Saturday, June 25, 2022
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Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Eve Tagny, Yza Nouiga
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Images Festival, Toronto
Co-presented with Planet in Focus and ESSE Magazine
Leaky Gardens considers the incontainability of edges and borders alongside the work of three artists who currently reside in so-called Canada.
Screen-recorded on her computer, Eve Tagny’s documentary Of Roses [how to embody the layers of time] Fragments of a bibliography delves into the historical, political, social, and symbolic context of roses as well as the geopolitical consequences of the rose market. Images, videos, recordings, and texts are presented as primary sources to build a multi-vocal model of the world of these flowers, from the garden to the home.
While Eve problematizes the rose garden popularized by settlers on Turtle Island, Yza Nouiga considers in Jardins Paradise who has access to gardens and what a garden for the people, particularly those of the Arab diaspora, might look like. Yza prompts the question: In what ways might a garden enforce and designate class, access, and ability, and define who has the right to leisure?
In both of these cases, the garden is conceived of as something in service—to a body, a community, a politic, an ideology… However, in Writing Landscape Vanessa Dion Fletcher plays with the ways the landscape is written onto the body and suggests that the body may in turn write with, as opposed to on, the landscape. Vanessa traverses coast lines and rock edges wearing handmade copper shoes. Land marks the plated footwear, which is then inked, printed onto paper, and now shared alongside the videos through the print’s inclusion in this catalogue. In a way, the marks made by the land become landmarks in and of themselves; the intaglio print then becomes an effigy to the possibility of being in right relationship with the land.
The films presented in Leaky Gardens begin to address the complexity of gardens and all that might pass through them. The porosity of the garden will be further explored in the 2023 Images Festival in a compilation program entitled Leakier Gardens. Complicating the notion of the garden as a gentle refuge, these films each reveal the garden’s colonial roots.
List of Works
Writing Landscape
Vanessa Dion Fletcher
CANADA | 2010 | DIGITAL | 4 MIN | NO DIALOGUE
This work began in my mouth with my voice and moved down to my
feet, and the earth. Writing Landscape is a series of images that were
created between my body and the land. The finished product consists
of three parts. A series of copper plates that were marked up when
I wore them on my feet walking over the land, a series of prints that
were produced from the copper plates, and this video of my performance of walking. Together, these images constitute an exploration
of the relationship between my identity as an indigenous woman and
Turtle Island. My project took place in three locations: Toronto, Ontario;
Thamesville, Ontario; and Pangnirtung, Nunavut. I chose these locations specifically for their historical and contemporary significance.
Of Roses [how to embody layers of time]
Fragments of a Bibliography
Eve Tagny
CANADA | 2021 | DIGITAL | 65 MIN | ENGLISH/FRENCH
Through the history and symbol of the rose, Tagny probes our desire to
possess, control and commercialize nature. A coveted flower central
to a vast global industry, the rose simultaneously embodies the ideas
of power, desire, femininity but also that of hybridity. Cultivated for
the most part in Ecuador and Kenya, the roses that are found on the
European and North American markets become symbols of migration,
as the journey travelled by the flowers echoes those of displaced and
labouring bodies. Retracing the domestication of nature as so many
layers of sediment in a garden, Of Roses [how to embody the layers
of time] dwells on the ways in which post-colonial structures manifest
today. The work brings to the surface buried histories and knowledge,
drawing attention to the complexities of the flower industry as well as
to the spirituality and commitment wrapped up in the care showered
upon a flower.
Jardins Paradise
Yza Nouiga
CANADA | 2021 | DIGITAL | 6 MIN | NO DIALOGUE
Jardins Paradise ironically diverts the image of the garden as the embodiment of some paradisiacal Eden. It highlights the civic inventiveness
of communities stigmatized by a lack of greenery in their neighborhood as well as the contribution of ethnocultural diversity to the urban landscape.
Jaclyn Quaresma 