Stir Q&A: Mi’gmaq photographer and mask-maker Duane Isaac explores Indigenous relationship between land and body

BY GAIL JOHNSON, STIR VANCOUVER

MI’GMAQ ARTIST DUANE Isaac fuses photography with contemporary fantastical masks, his work informed by Indigenous knowledge and the queer gaze.

SUM gallery opens its 2022 season with Sovereignty, the Listuguj, Quebec-based photographer and mask-maker’s first solo exhibition in Vancouver. Featuring a series of portraits documenting the Indigenous body in nature, the show speaks to Indigenous and environmental health and survival.

Curated by SUM gallery founding artistic director emeritus SD Holman, Sovereignty is part of the 2022 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.

Stir connected with Isaac to hear more.

Speaking generally, what is it about masks that attracts you and motivated you to incorporate this form into your photography?

People often connect through eye contact, even through a photo the eyes are often inviting. Obscuring this connection forces the mind to look for other things to connect to. I think it’s also a matter of fantasy, that the person behind the mask is a stranger. While the photos are intimate, you really don’t know who’s behind the mask.

Can you tell us about the creative process behind them?

I’ve developed my process over the years. Lots of trial and error. First thing I do is create a basic shape. Every mask begins the same way. Then I decide on outer features that extrude from the mask itself. Ears, horns, random geometric shapes? There’s no limitation but imagination. My materials are either made by me via molds, or items I’ve amassed through various means—yard sales, art-supply stores, etc.

As far as details go, I love baroque design elements. You’ll find my work adorned with cherubs, skulls, insects, roses, and pearls. I love monsters, the occult and anime/cartoonish villain of the week creatures. I like the idea of a beautiful monster or beautiful villain.

So many horror movies use masks for the main character, making them especially terrifying. Do you draw from the genre? 

I am definitely a horror fan. I remember growing up with Ghostface, Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Leatherface, to name a few. All the greats had a mask. Those elements are definitely an inspiration. Again I’d refer back to my point about obscured faces. You can’t connect to the “human” of a masked villain. There is reason to fear that. I also feel like masks can also bring out the things we wouldn’t normally do without the anonymity they provide. 

In Sovereignty, the figure’s mask is said to represent dualism, Indigenous identity as inseparable from and equal to the Land. Can you tell us more? 

Historically, Indigenous people have been the stewards of this land. We take care of the land and it takes care of us. It has always been that way. We need it in more ways than it needs us. We need food, water, and medicines. All provided by the land. If the land is sick, we are sick. One prime example would be the many reservations under boil-advisory orders.

The exhibition speaks to sovereignty under threat. Can you expand on this? 

So much of the unceded territory in Canada is subjected to devastation from things like chemical waste runoff or rampant expansion of resource extraction. Reserve lands are often in proximity to sites used for pipelines, natural gas exploration, and factories. Often these projects involve “man camps”, which have a troubling link to MMIW [Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls]. 

How do your Indigenous ancestry and queerness inform your work?

For years I’ve had this self imposed ostracism from my culture. I felt unaccepted by it because of the anxiety surrounding my sexual orientation. It’s definitely not the typical idea when you think of “Indigenous, or Mi’gmaq, art”. Whenever there’s a call for Indigenous artists, it’s always almost a fetishist expectation of beads, feathers and leather. That’s not to say these aspects aren’t important, they are. I envy those who have these beautiful talents. Sometimes I feel like a fraud compared to them. I appreciate and celebrate every artist who works to preserve, promote and progress traditional craft. My work is definitely through an Indigenous lens though. I am Mi’gmaq, I have spent my entire life surrounded by my culture, in proximity to ceremony, and listening to the language. This will always come through my work.

With the Indigenous lens, there is also a queer lens. It’s again brought through lived experience. I feel this comes through in the fantasy aspects and celebration of the male physique.

For more information, see SUM gallery.

BLACK QUEER or ALLIED COMMUNITY RESOURCES

BlackVanClub

Connecting the dots for Black People In Vancouver.

Black Van Club was born out of the desire to connect and share events around Vancouver for and by Black People. Check out their Instagram @vanblackclub for weekly event updates!

Vancouver, Blackness, Culture.

Vancouver Black Library

Described as “a safe space for thinkers, artists and other community members looking for connection,” VBL offers a free book borrowing system for resources and a workspace for and by POC folks.

Follow their Instagram for event announcements and mutual aid calls @vanblacklibarary

Located in the basement of the Sun Wah Centre, 072-268 Keefer St. Hours are 12-6pm, Thursday through Saturday.

The Black Arts Centre (BLAC)

The Black Arts Centre (BLAC) is a Black youth owned and operated gallery and community site based in Surrey, BC that is dedicated to supporting multidisciplinary art created by Black youth. 

theblackartscentre@gmail.com

Love Intersections

Love Intersections is a media arts collective made up of queer artists of colour dedicated to using collaborative art making and relational storytelling to address systemic racism in our communities. We produce intersectional and intergenerational stories from underrepresented communities of colour – centering the invisible, the spiritual, the metaphysical and the imaginary. We believe in deep and meaningful relationships, that intersectionality is a verb and a call to action, that we must cultivate social trust through collective care and community responsibility. Our desire is to provoke (he)artful social change through a lens of love.

Hogan’s Alley Society

The Hogan’s Alley Society (HAS) is a non-profit organization composed of civil rights activists, business professionals, community organizations, artists, writers and academics committed to daylighting the presence of Black history in Vancouver and throughout British Columbia. HAS adopts a research driven approach to community development that seeks to preserve and promote the historical, cultural, societal and economic contributions made by Black Settlers and their descendants to Vancouver, Greater Vancouver, the Province of British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest and Canada. With this history in the archives, HAS is in process of developing partnerships with local government and business interests to acquire and develop land and operate assets as a community land trust.

info@hogansalleysociety.org

Battered Women’s Support Services

Battered Women’s Support Services provides support and advocacy for women, trans women and gender minorities who have experienced abuse. Programs include support groups, counselling, Women’s Safety and Outreach Program, career exploration, legal advocacy, YOUth Ending Violence; and Violence, Media Representations and Families media literacy program

1-855-687-1868

PACE Society

PACE provides critical frontline supports to Sex Workers, including violence prevention education, one-to-one support, advocacy & referrals, peer outreach, and drop-in services.

604-872-7651

Rainbow Refugee

Rainbow Refugee supports and assists LGBTQ and/or HIV+ asylum seekers, refugee claimants and refugees in Canada . They also hold information drop-ins where lesbian gay bi trans queer /HIV+ people considering or making a claim can learn about the application process and community resources.

info@rainbowrefugee.ca

WISH Drop-In Centre Society

WISH works to improve the health, safety and well-being of women who are involved in Vancouver’s street-based sex trade.

 info@wishdropincentre.org 

WISH Shelter:

340 Alexander Street (entrance in alley)

Vancouver, BC, Canada V6A 1C3

604-558-4031

JQT Vancouver 

An arts, cultural and educational non-profit dedicated to creating connections and seeking space to celebrate our intersectional identities as Jews of all ages, diverse sexual orientations, as well as gender and sex identities, by queering Jewish space and ‘Jewifying’ queer space. 

Kiwassa Neighbourhood House

Kiwassa Neighbourhood House is a gathering place where people of all ages, cultures and walks of life can make friends, participate in programs, find resources, share ideas, and contribute to community life. Offers free meals, counselling and children’s programs primarily geared towards low-income families. Located in the heart of the east Vancouver/Commercial Drive area where a large population of trans/gender variant and queer people reside.

604-254-5401

Mosaic

Mosaic delivers services from 32 client-accessible sites; services include settlement assistance; English language training; employment programs; interpretation and translation; counselling services; and community outreach for families and individuals, including children, youth and seniors.  MOSAIC also offers services for the LGBTQ and temporary foreign worker communities.

604-254-9626

Saige Community Food Bank – Trans/Gender Variant Safe Space

The food bank provides a safe space for transgender and gender non-conforming or queer individuals to access healthy food, as well as support from their LGBT peers.

Dragonstone Counselling – lower-cost counselling

Core values of offering respectful and informed holistic care to people who have experienced marginalization. Lower-cost counselling for $60 or less. They do not turn people away due to lack of funds. Prioritizes lower cost counselling for the following groups of people:

  • people with disabilities and chronic health conditions
  • newcomers to Canada
  • including undocumented newcomers
  • LGBTQ people
  • Black, Indigenous and People of Colour
  • and single parents

604-738-7557

info@dragonstonecounselling.ca

The Masc and Femme We Wear—A night of readings from QTBIPOC writers

Virtual event: Sat, Mar 26, 3 – 5pm

Queer BIPOC writers and poets convene for The Masc and Femme We Wear: The Queer Bodypolitic of Ethnicity, taking place via Zoom on Mar 26 at 3pm PST. Participating writers will perform written works centred around the intersections of queerness, ethnicity, gender representation and body image for a night of readings and performance curated by award-winning writer and activist Berend McKenzie. Join our performers as their work explores and begs the following questions: What are the costs of masking or revealing one’s inner self under the glaring stage lights of colonialist supremacy? How do the expectations of a salacious white gaze fit, chafe, bind, or even unravel the BIPOC queer body and spirit? How is the BIPOC queer body eroticized and fetishized?

ABOUT BEREND MCKENZIE

Berend McKenzie (he/she/they interchangeably) is an award-winning playwright, actor, producer, screenwriter, and published author living on Treaty 6 land otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta. Berend is best known for his ground-breaking, Jessie Richardson Award nominated one-person show NGGRFG. He has worked with Oscar-winning actresses Halle Berry and Angelina Jolie. Berend is currently writing his first auto-fiction novel, Adopted. In October 2021, Berend’s short story Hockey Night in Canada was published in the anthology Between Certain Death and A Possible Future: Queer Writing in Growing up with the AIDS Crisis (Arsenal Pulp Press) and has just completed writing their first TV pilot under option with Warner Media.

+ readings from artists C.E.  Gatchalian, Tia Kushniruk, Serena Bhandar, Lili Robinson, Kyle Shaughnessy!

Gender Pirates

gender
1: a construct
pirate
1: one who robs on the high seas
also: one who commits acts resembling robbery

Virtual Event: Mar 31 at 7pm

We’re celebrating International Transgender Day of Visibility with Gender Pirates: an online evening of trans-centred events curated by Bobbi Kozinuk. Who are Gender Pirates, you ask? Gender Pirates are folks who defy society’s preconceptions of gender performance and expression; they are people who have fought (and continue to fight) to create their own space; and they’re individuals who make their own rules and inspire others to live their truths. Join us for an evening that shines a spotlight on extraordinary trans lives, with a special performance of Kozinuk’s Vertigo, a reading by artist and activist Yoseñio V. Lewis, and a soundscape performance by sound artist and DJ, Brady Marks. And keep an eye on our social media that week for special Instagram takeovers and media shares!

Queering the Air—A Quintessentially Queer Concert Series presented by SUM gallery

Feb 11 – Mar 11, 2022

SUM gallery is proud to present our first Queering the Air concert series: music that presents the many sides of queerness, from darkest introspection to the most radiant joy. We launch this series with renowned Two-Spirit baritone Jonathon Adams in a special concert at the Bill Reid Gallery; The McGregor-Verdejo Duo takes us back to SUM gallery with music inspired by isolation, love, and loss; Sarah Jo Kirsch introduces us to the Romantic non-binary muse, Mignon; and concluding our series, Sex Lives of Vegetables: Music of Leslie Uyeda, an evening of dazzling vocal music by the composer who gave us the world’s first lesbian opera. 

Concert schedule:

Feb 11, 7:30pm | In Darkness: Lute Songs of John Dowland Celebrated baritone Jonathon Adams and lutenist Lucas Harris give a special performance at the Bill Reid Gallery, co-presented with Müzewest Concerts. Hosted by Bill Reid Gallery, 639 Hornby St., Vancouver SOLD OUT

Feb 18, 7:30pm | McGregor-Verdejo Duo The Vancouver flute & guitar duo present a program of queer longing and isolation with music by Matthew-John Knights, Rodney Sharman, Hiroki Tsurumoto, and Gabriella Yorke. Hosted by SUM gallery, #425 – 268 Keefer St., Vancouver

Feb 25, 7:30pm | Mignon Mignon, a non-binary icon of German Romanticism, is brought to life through the music of Zelter, Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf, performed by soprano Sarah Jo Kirsch and pianist Tina Chang. Hosted by SUM gallery, #425 – 268 Keefer St., Vancouver

Mar 11, 7:30pm | Sex Lives of Vegetables: Music of Leslie Uyeda The scandalous, gorgeous, and profound vocal music of Leslie Uyeda, featuring soprano Heather Pawsey, clarinetist AK Coope, and pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa.Hosted by SUM gallery, #425 – 268 Keefer St., Vancouver


These concerts are being presented in adherence to current provincial guidelines regarding health and safety. In-person attendance will be limited and socially distanced. Mask wearing and presentation of vaccine passports will be mandatory.

Read the press release for Queering the Air.

Promotional artwork: When Trees Are Alone by Holly Steele

Sovereignty—Duane Isaac

Feb 17 – May 14, 2022

This exhibition is open to view during our regular gallery hours: Tue-Sat, 12 to 6pm

Curator
SD Holman

Sovereignty is Mi’gmaq photographer and mask-maker Duane Isaac’s first solo exhibition in Vancouver. The mixed-media photographic installation explores an Indigenous body in nature outfitted with a fantastical mask—one side overgrown with fledgling greenery while the other half conjures a ghost of the human face beneath. The figure is overtaken by flames, mask first. Motivated by the health and survival of Indigenous bodies and Indigenous Lands, Isaac casts his model as a vessel of sovereignty under threat; “Sovereignty explores the questions of autonomy and health of both body and Land. The health of the Land will reflect the health of the body and the health of the body will reflect the health of the Land. One cannot survive without the other.” The figure’s mask embodies this nonduality, representing Indigenous identity as equal to and inseparable from the Land. In this installation, four masks gaze out from the centre of the gallery, standing sentinel to the four directions.

Isaac’s artistic practice traces the ephemeral, hand-crafting surreal and otherworldly masks solely for his portraiture, then heightening their narrative presence through lighting and digital manipulation. Ranging from darkly demure to expressively gaudy, his masks are opulent, clever, twisted, unsettling, sexy, and unquestionably queer. His lens seeks a balanced relationship between body and mind, where masks externalize a rich internal world populated by grotesque and seductive creatures, guided by Indigenous ways of knowing, the queer gaze, environmental angst, and an apocalyptic perspective on the past and future.

Balance is less easily found in Sovereignty—the final tableau, a portrait of absence where the figure’s red garment lies amongst the undergrowth, poses many-layered questions. Has the garment been shed by the Body, or donned by the Land? Where does the one end and the other begin? Sovereignty is so hot! Are we witness to immolation or ignition?

This exhibition is part of the 2022 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.

Duane Isaac is a First Nation Mi’gmaq from Listuguj, QC. He is a contemporary artist who uses the photography medium in combination with his mask making. His work has been featured in multiple online publications, most recently Canadian Art Magazine. He currently resides in Listuguj, QC.

Watch our Sovereignty artist talk with Duane Isaac and curator SD Holman, originally screened as part of our Sovereignty cinq à sept on Apr 9. This talk is presented as part of the 2022 Capture Photography Festival Special Exhibition Program.

Read the press release for Sovereignty.

Artist Residency—Dion Smith-Dokkie

Jan 4 – Jan 31

SUM gallery activates the New Year with a new artist residency program featuring Vancouver-based West Moberly First Nations artist Dion Smith-Dokkie. Throughout the month of January, Dion will create new multimedia work and engage the community through free, artist-led drawing workshops and an open house. In groups of five, workshop participants will create collaborative charcoal drawings, with a focus on intuitive mark-making and an experimental approach to space and form. Register here to attend a workshop. Space is limited and proof of vaccination is required.

Workshop dates:

Dion Smith-Dokkie (he, they) is a painter and visual artist currently living in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ. He is a recent graduate of the UBC MFA in Visual Arts program. Dion also holds degrees from the University of Victoria and Concordia University. His practice hones in on colour and light, skin, screens, clouds and skies, and interfaces of all sorts through the lens of painting, drawing, and video. He grew up in the Peace River region of British Columbia and Alberta and is a member of West Moberly First Nations.

Open house: Feb 3 & 4, 12 to 7pm

Over the course of January, artist-in-residence Smith-Dokkie created a series of pastel drawings. The works in this series, will soften these away – will these soften away represent a burgeoning inquiry into texture, touch, drawing, light and colour. Softness, delicateness, sensitivity were key processual principles. View these fabulous works and meet the artist behind the work by dropping in to our open houses Feb 3 & 4 from 12 to 7pm.

Artist statement:
This series of drawings took on a very different shape to the one I envisioned when I proposed this residency. Instead of an intermedia dialogue between drawing and video, the drawings asked that I come close, that I breathe in the pigments so that something could also blossom in me. I thought about Masao Okabe’s irradiated trees and Simon Hantaï’s étoilements: I folded, crushed, and creased the paper to introduce a topographical sense, bas and haut relief and to stimulate frottage, planar out-foldings—this allowed me to randomize, to miniaturize the pointillist open brushstroke and pixel. The drawings are studies in chromatic filaments, garden sites, woven colours, textures that morph.

Please note that vaccine passports and masks will be required to enter the gallery. If you plan on visiting the gallery after 6pm on open house dates, please contact the gallery at 604-200-6661 to gain access to the Sun Wah Centre.

Vivek Shraya – Trans artist challenges the use of trauma narratives in an era of virtue signalling

Galleries West | April 14, 2021

Trauma Clown, by Vivek Shraya, on view as part of the Capture Photography Festival at Vancouver’s SUM Gallery until July 1, is a soft but potent critique of audiences and viewing institutions in an era of virtue signalling. 

The Trauma Clown is the effect of the very contemporary thirst for stories of suffering. In a series of 10 portrait-like photographs, Shraya’s performer steps progressively deeper into the role of the clown, to greater and greater praise and public affection. This series questions the emphasis on trauma narratives in queer artistic expression. What is the danger of trading stories of trauma and redemption as cultural currency?

Shraya plays the character of the emerging artist, steadily revealing more of herself until she becomes the caricature of her suffering. She moves from the Lovesick Clown, a hoody-wearing, guitar-strumming singer-songwriter to unveil the clown with increasing intensity. This steady transformation plays across her body and weaves a deft relationship between the audience’s desire for her to expose more of herself and the increasing commodification of her performance.

In the sixth photograph, she is finally the Trauma Clown: on her knees among piles of flowers, her clown makeup streaked by sweat and tears, arms open in full availability to the unseen crowd. From this triumphalism, she begins to fade from view. Gallery Clown sets her inside the window of an iPhone, while Media Clown is an ‘image of her image’ in a magazine. Ultimately, in Your Clown, she is a framed photo on your wall, among the artful tableau of your things. 

Prepare to be implicated. Shraya takes aim at mainstream audiences, art institutions and popular narratives. In an interview with Shraya and curator SD Holman on the show’s opening weekend, Holman pointed to the effect of the trauma narrative in the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race – the ways in which sad backstories propel participants to victory. Shraya’s point is that the demand for stories of queer oppression have become the bread and butter of the queer artist in the mainstream media.

If, as a viewer, you come to this show as a member of the mainstream (white, straight, cis to be sure), however educated you may be, the temptation might be to connect these photographs to drag. This would be an easy misconception since the photographs are not accompanied by any text. It’s left to the audience to get things going, so one might find oneself mentally thumbing the pages of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble to make connections between what is taught about drag and the trans body we see.

I was grateful that Shraya, in her talk, cautions her audience not to conflate transness with drag. As I see it, the connection to drag in Trauma Clown, if any, is more carefully embedded in the performance imagery, where hyperbolized acts form a critique of the institutions from which they are born.

Shraya’s exhibition is an opportunity for audiences to consider their role in the capitalist viewing machine, and the ways that looking can make objects of the real bodies we see. ■  

Vivek Shraya: Trauma Clown at the SUM Gallery in Vancouver from April 1 to July 1, 2021. 

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