Works
Artists
 

 

 

 

HOME(LAND) is a multimedia exhibition project examining how concepts of land intersect and dialogue with the fluid, and shifting characteristics of identity, belonging, and home across and between races, regions, cultures and nations.

Throughout a series of three exhibitions, HOME(LAND) investigates the complex issues surrounding contemporary cultural discourses on global migration, site, and identity. Artists from diverse backgrounds whose practice and work are infused by unique interracial complexities, examine questions on concepts such as kinship, ancestry, memory, and racialization.

The second exhibition, HOME(LAND): Terra Firma evokes the earth as a powerful natural element that connects us directly to the land, the territory that we inhabit and where we build and fabric our home. In the foreground, the selected works tackle ideas of symbio-politics, environmental governance, cultural borders, and social displacement and erasure from a perspective of individual resilience and community resistance and participation.

 

Where
Cloverdale Common Cultural Hub at Cloverdale Mall
250 The East Mall, Toronto, ON M9B 3Y83.

Hours
Wednesday – Saturday, 10-6pm
Sunday, 10-5pm
 

Curator Tour
Check online tour here

Artist Panel (online)

Sat, March 15, 5pm  on zoom Register here

Artists on Site
Nava Waxman Sat, April 2 2-4pm Register here
Alexandra Gelis Sat, May 28 2-4pm Register here

In My Element – Tero – Earth
Sat May 7  10-4pm (In person at the West Hub) Register here

Terra Firma, explores how the earth, the soil and ultimately the land becomes an integral part of our identity and very being. Rooted in observation and interaction with natural landscapes, artists in this exhibition explore the notion of kinship as an interconnected and inextricably system existing between the earth, the land and all living things. 

Virtual tour

Works

 
 
 
 
 
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Alexandra Gelis

With – Living Migrant Relations

2021
Interactive multimedia Installation

The installation exhibits plants, soil, bacteria, and stories of migration in a constant biological, political and reciprocal relationship. This interactive, sculptural-sound and film installation traces the transfer of seeds from their native environment to another, either by natural action (wind, water, animals) or by human intervention. This relocation, informed by notions of resistance in the process of migration, allows plants to become allies who nourish the body, the land and the spirit.  

By using threads of human hair in form of braids, Gelis registers the movement of seeds from Africa to the Americas. Enslaved African women of San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia used to hide seeds in their braids and mapped escape routes using traditional hair braiding designs. This resistance tactic helped free African enslaved people in the 17th century. 

Subsequently, the installation presents plants as storytellers and allies to shape human history. Through an interactive sound component, visitors can listen to short stories of migrants living in Toronto intertwined with soundscapes of plants like plantain, coffee and guayaba (Guava) in their native environment. 

An old water pump triggers a 16mm film revealing the internal chemistry of plants that have been exposed to photographic emulsion and direct sunlight for many hours. This process is called phytography and offers a unique view of plants molecular and chemical exchange. The project invites visitors to interact with the hand pump and to play with the pace of the film.

Visitors are invited to share their own stories on the collective journal and to draw and sketch plants from the installation and from their own memories while experiencing subtle vibrations from the sound natural landscapes. 

Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian-Venezuelan, media artist with a background in visual arts and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Studies at York University. Her work predominantly involves photography, video, electronic and digital processes. Gelis’ work addresses the use of the image in relation to displacement, landscape and politics beyond borders or culturally specific subjects.

www.alexandragelis.com   IG: @alexandragelis

Dana Claxton

Tatanka 1 & 2

2019
Lightjet print on vinyl

With striking saturated colors Tatanka 1& 2 speaks to the history of Indigenous people, the land and its delicate and vulnerable ecosystem. Tatanka — tȟatȟáŋka — is a word of the Lakota community for buffalo/bison. This traditional American specie once roamed the lands of the north in vast herds from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. For many indigenous communities, this emblematic and iconic figure of social and cultural significance represents life, spirituality, bravery, kindness, strength, and respect. It provides sheltering with its hide, meat for food, horns for utensils and inner organs for containers and medicinal purposes. It nearly became extinct due to colonial brutal tactics during the period of extermination and its value as an international commodity. Their bones were crushed and exported to England to make bone china, one of the finest and strongest of the porcelain or china ceramics. 

Through multiple reintroductions and programs, herds have been slowly reestablished on indigenous lands maintaining and establishing its cultural and spiritual means. The specie is freely roaming wild in a few regions of Turtle Island.

Vancouver-based Hunkpapa Lakota, Sioux artist Dana Claxton frequently draws influence from home. Raised in Moose Jaw, ‘home’ for Claxton continues to be Saskatchewan, where she grew up. As a descendent of Lakota women who walked to Canada with Sitting Bull, Claxton explored the history from which she descends. 

As a a critically acclaimed international exhibiting artist, she works in film, video, photography, single and multi- channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. She is Head and a Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with the University of British Columbia and a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan.

www.danaclaxton.com   IG: @danaclax

 
 
 
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Helio Eudoro

Invisible

2017 – ongoing
Photo Essay – Lightjet prints mounted on dibond

Invisible explores the complex and multiple layers of invisibility as a mechanism of power. In this ongoing photographic essay, Eudoro investigates exclusion and sociocultural erasure through different landscapes and settings. By using interacting with different elements, he immerse himself in environments as a silent protest, protest against social and moral discrimination, systemic and colonial effacement and the inevitable expurgation of neoliberalism through the lens of diaspora, sexuality, body image, and aging.

Eudoro’s interventions reflect as well on the idea of social camouflage and alienation. To “blend in” a particular landscape by behaving differently or suppressing certain thoughts or actions is a common response to non-negotiable and oppressive systems. The project invites the viewer to reflect on the different social, political and cultural effacement structures and our response towards them.

Helio Eudoro is a Brazilian-Canadian artist based in Toronto. 2020 RBC Newcomer Arts Award recipient. Through his photo-based multi-disciplinary work, he explores layers of visibility that cross dimensions such as gender, sexuality, the body, income, immigration, age, diaspora and other forms of social and cultural exclusion.

The artist acknowledge and thanks photographer Steve Shapor for his partnership and assistance in this project.

www.helio-eudoro.format.com   IG: @nada_is_nothing

 
 
 
 
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O Manto de Invisibilidade 3

2017
Video performance, 00:06:22
Music: Milton Nascimento, Clube da Esquina N2

In O Manto de Invisibilidade 3, Eudoro continues to explore notions of erasure and defacement perpetrated by multiple socio-cultural systems. He descontructs clothes donated by his peers and sewed into a wearable experiential garment also knows as Parangolé. This term, meaning a sudden agitation, an unexpected situation, or a dance party, is rooted in the marginality of Rio de Janeiro’s most impoverished inhabitants and was first adopted by artist Helio Oitca in the 60’s.

Through a performative gesture, Eudoro wears the Manto as a Parangolé and dance. In a light mirrored swayed motion, the performance refers to an emotional isolation but at the same time creates a safe space. It protects and liberate identities, bodies and souls from stereotypes, judgments and prejudices in a mirrored swayed experience for us to contemplate and reflect on.

 
 
 
 
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O Manto

2021
Wearable experiential garment

As an iteration of his previous performative works, Eudoro constructs once again the Manto. This time by using non-gender clothes he explores bias and cultural segmentation and suppression towards sex, gender and ultimately the body. To un-genderfy is a way of re-learning how we came to identify ourselves through the body and how repressive social and cultural foundations incite the behavioural need to be concealed or disguised and encourage a way of thinking in exile.

The Manto continues to be a symbolic and active component in his research for effacement structures and cultural inclusion. As mechanism of power, it protects and reveal, activates the body and allows individuals and their identities to be free.

Muse Arts

Our Home, Our Communities

2021
Mix Media Installation – Community /engaged based project
One hundred houses made of cardboard and other recycling materials

Our Home, Our Communities is an art-based community engagement project exploring ideas of what makes a home. For many, home is a place of refuge and it’s where a person feels safe and accepted. A home tells a story and expresses a person, family’s or community’s interests and it requires an emotional connection and sense of belonging with the land, the earth and its nature. The project invites community members to draw on their idea of home and explore its interrelated connection with the land. Through a series of workshops, participants have used cardboard boxes and other recycling materials to build a representation of their home. The extraction of natural resources, land ownership, climate change and the current housing crisis are some of the multiple conversations that took place during these online and in-person workshops. 

An installation consisting of one hundred houses made of cardboard and other recycling materials dangle from different modules allowing visitors to go around and explore each particular representation of home. Visitors are invited to reflect on their on vision about home and its intimate relationship with the land.

MUSE Arts, is an artist-run community arts organization focused on creating spaces and engaging communities meaningfully and actively in hands-on, high-quality arts, empowerment, and education. MUSE Arts integrates issues of social justice, and focuses on community and peace building. They also create space for artists from equity-seeking groups to showcase their work and access opportunities for professional development.

www.musearts.ca   IG: @museartsto

 
 
 
 
 
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Nava Waxman

Shared View

2021
Performative multimedia installation including AR components, multi-channel projection, video performance, objects, and immersive sound

Shared View explores notions of identity, liminality, and belonging in a moving symbiotic relationship between Canada, the Sahara desert, and the Judean desert. Through video performances, objects, sound and AR components, Waxman delves into the idea of a permeable land that constantly negotiates its political, physical and imaginary borders with our memories, bodies and souls. With an attempt to question our sense of belonging, she relocates embodied experiences that intersect with multiple geographical locations and ideas of diaspora, (dis)placement and migration. 

As a transitional-being born and raised in-between cultural systems, Waxman shares her personal history though site-specific performances recorded at multiple times and locations over the course of three years. These recordings are projected along a constellation of  physical and virtual objects like wood, jars, paint and a flag. The installation brings the viewer closer to the act of dwelling beyond borders, cultures, and time from a subjective condition. Marked by the contingencies of personal histories, identities, places and physical and emotional borders are shifting back and forth constantly, relocating and reconstructing our memories, our bodies, our sense of belonging, and the construction of subjectivity.

Nava Messas-Waxman is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist working with visual and time-based media, including performance, painting, drawing, moving-image, and installation. Her practice engages with notions of identity, memory, liminality, and the body as an archive. Born in Netivot, Israel to a Moroccan Jewish family, she investigates themes of movement, migration, time, and space while delving into the transitory nature of gestures often embedded within complex artistic, cultural, and personal registers.

www.navawaxman.com   IG: @navawaxman_m

Artists

Alexandra Gelis

Dana Claxton

Helio Eudoro

MUSE Arts

Nava Messas-Waxman

Contact Us

Cloverdale Mall Hub
250 The East Mall, Toronto, ON M9B 3Y8
kate.nankervis@artworxto.ca