May: Showcase @ Canteen and a feature in Capital Xtra
by nadijah
So this post is long overdue. I’ve been recovering from my BFA degree, and adjusting to some major change in my life…. I’ve moved (back) to Toronto!
Yay! and also… Yay! I’m doing a showcase @ Canteen in Ottawa!
I’m showing the Boom Bip series, which is 6 small pieces. It’s up until May 30th, 2010. Check out Canteen here and my works that are showing here.
Also, the amazing Lara Purvis wrote a wonderful feature in Capital Xtra on my showcase.
She interviewed me while I set up my wall at Canteen, and the interview was this beautiful unfolding of a conversation that seemed like it had just began.. like it could have gone on for a long time. This was such a hectic weekend. I’d just finished my BFA degree, which ended with a graduating show. I had just dismantled that show, I had my family visiting from Toronto and had just sent them off, and later that evening I was saying good-bye to my chosen family in Ottawa, at a barbeque. My mind was all over the place; in-between cities and caught up in this transition in my life. My mood was supremely grateful and in this space where I was finally comfortable in my exhaustion. Grateful, because Ottawa has given me so much radical beauty, love and happiness throughout the better part of my five years there. And it was ending with this surprising bang: I had a wonderful studio visit about a week earlier (my first studio visit); I got this amazing opportunity to showcase at Canteen; Lara Purvis wanted to feature me in Capital Xtra; and my chosen family and dearest friends were showing me so much love, I really could not be anything but busting at the seams with gratitude. My being my nervous self, I felt like I was stammering and stopping and being generally unintelligible. But Lara made me feel really at ease, and was accommodating and on-point. I feel like I could thank her forever.
One quote that I’m happy was included in the article was this:
“Generally, because I feel like an outsider most of the time, in terms of my position in society on the margins, I look at things like I can critique because I’m not part of it. But while this art reflects my place in society, it also has a wider appeal. What I see is not necessarily what others see. It’s not art of the margins, for the margins. It could be about hip hop, it could be about African dance, it could be about romanticism. I’d like people to enjoy it for many reasons.”
And just as a postscript to anyone who reads the article. Although it hints that I may not be making art or showing art again for a while, I definitely intend to be making and showing as much as I can in the foreseeable future.. just probably not in Ottawa.
