“Sometimes we come to accept the truth slowly - in stages. Sometimes we have reasons to hold on to a lie, we’re not ready to let go of the world that the lie preserves, the people the lie keeps close to us. And we release the lie from our hand one finger at a time.” - Ira Glass
This work began when I moved to lək̓ʷəŋən land, an exhausted parent with a young child and I was feeling isolated. My socially engaged practice felt stagnant. As my parents moved to the city my dad was diagnosed with dementia - life would eventually get bigger but the transition was going to be slow. This was my place on the life cycle: my child and father were crossing over one another. My child was learning the exact things that my father was unlearning, or losing. And, much of what was shaping and growing how my child navigates the world, her learning, was what I had been working to unlearn in the last decades.
This exhibition explores these cyclical relationships, hoping they hold relatable truths about how to tell stories outside of current hegemonic structures about where we are at, our history, and our future. It begins with my caregiving realities, the ways I know how each story I choose to tell and how I choose to tell it are shaping how my kiddo understands herself, and how that is in deep relationship to understanding the world around her. Seeing, simultaneously, the way that eventually this knowing may drift away gives me space to allow that dismantling privilege, recognizing supremacy and living into reconciliation and justice are ongoing parts of the life cycle - not a goal to reach. This reflective, looping installation hopes to invite viewers into this collective work of endurance that requires continual growing of tools of questioning, resilience, and joy - that knows it is in relationship with sorrow (Ross Gay).
All of this… “one finger at a time.”
Video excerpts embedded in sculptures can be viewed here.
This project was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Photos by Kyra Kordoski, courtesy of Open Space Arts Society
