Every Fiber of My Being

Fiona Annis

Ursula Handleigh

Terrance Houle

Justin Waddell

Every Fiber of My Being brings together four Canadian artists whose work addresses inherited regional, immigrant, and indigenous experiences in Canada. The photographic and time-based pieces engage in political and geographical environments, the poetics of memory, and the humor of coping mechanisms, all through various lenses and processes.

Ursula Handleigh’s Needlework (2016) contemplates inherited ancestral stories from England and the Philippines. By way of camera-less photography, Handleigh stitches images of family members into blank pieces of photographic paper, and then floats them in developing baths in the darkroom. Through this process, the stitching absorbs the liquid developer along the lines of the sewn image, which then bleeds onto the photo paper, creating a line drawing that is both representational and poetic in its reference to bloodlines, inheritance, and the transferring of memory.

Justin Waddell’s practice also engages in family archive, focusing on a Japanese internment camp where his relatives were held in British Columbia. Photographing Canadian-mined clay draped over objects recovered from the historical site, his images recall the dilapidated tents and terrifying living conditions in which detainees were forced to live.

With the use of an ice fishing tent, Fiona Annis develops analog photography immediately on-site during shoots, producing images in the same environment and setting that they visually represent. The fishing tent, a provisional and fibrous structure, is not an ideal darkroom, and thus creates challenges for developing images. In Untitled (shadows, signs, wonders – No. 2) (2013) Annis exposed a piece of photographic paper for a period of time inside the tent, in turn capturing the light-leaks and phantom images of the surrounding exterior landscape.

In Aakaisttsiiksiinaakii: Many Snake Woman: “The Daughters After Me” (2008) Terrance Houle references a painting of his grandmother, May Weaselfat, made by European romantic-style painter Reinhold Reiss. For the sitting, Reiss provided Weaselfat with a prop—a blanket draped over her—to depict her as a “noble savage.” Terrance’s video features female family members, including his grandmother, mother, sister, and daughter, sitting for portraits in a similar pose, and draped in a similar blanket. While the work attempts to honor the women in his family, it also interrogates the inescapable and perpetual Western image of the “vanishing Indian.”

Stephanie Deumer (b.1989, Oakville, Ontario) is a Canadian artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. In 2018 she participated in The Dark Arts Residency at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, and was awarded a 2018 Artist Grant from Bar-Fund LA. Currently, her work is on display in Far from Fixed at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Center in Kingston, Ontario. Recent exhibitions include Co/Lab III, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance (2018); Real Shadows for Mere Bodies, College of the Canyons, Valencia (2017); and The Body of Language and The Motion of Words, Paved Arts, Saskatoon (2017). Deumer received a BA at the University of Guelph, an MFA at California Institute of the Arts, and will be a 2018/2019 attendee of the Whitney ISP in New York.