Behind the Curtain, before the Velvet Rope
Installation view of Emmitukwemk : The Visit, 2023. Image courtesy of The Blue Building Gallery. Photo: Ryan Josey.
A review of Emmitukwemk: The Visit by Ursula Johnson.
October 7–December 17, 2023, Blue Building Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia
In a town where space is at a premium, the Blue Building luxuriates in long sight lines and negative space. Nested within the rectangular geometry of the gallery, Emmitukwemk: The Visit, by Ursula Johnson, is the first exhibition I have seen that has held its own against the imposing 1400-square-foot room. Johnson reconstitutes the space, so that what is normally a high-ceilinged, open area is now a tight entrance area and behind the gallerist’s desk there looms a thickly curtained threshold one has to cross. The emotional impact of the project emanates from this immersive quality. To view this piece, you must be swallowed by it, meditate within it, and come out subtly changed by the experience. From her deconstruction of the “white cube” to the recursive use of language, Johnson’s installation is unsettling, with all the connotations that the word holds in arts discourse today.
The work rests on an exploration of Indigenous resilience in the face of colonial legacies, played out in the lived experience of the artist. Johnson describes, in a letter, how she learned the Catholic hymn “Ave Maria'' in the Mi’kmaw language as a child. She carried this song with her to a residency in Venice, where she began unravelling the cultural history she carries as an L’nu person raised in a Eurocentric Christian tradition. Johnson writes that the translated song, known in L’nu as “Kulein Mali,” was “comforting and familiar … associated with home, my family, the community, and the church.” Emmitukwemk: The Visit is an investigation of this entanglement between outer and inner worlds, discourse and self, regimes of power and the liberatory imagination.
Emmitukwemk: The Visit is difficult to write about, perhaps because I find it difficult to view this work with critical detachment, from “the outside.” As a person of settler origin educated in the Western humanities tradition, the language and artistic context that I bring to the work are implicated in the conversation it instigates about the consequences of colonial occupation. In the cramped space of intellectual analysis, I try to grapple with this collision, compacting my words into ever tighter qualifying statements. Like all great works of deconstruction, Emmitukwemk: The Visit reuses fragments, and in doing so, it throws the original purpose of the parts into stark relief. In this vestibule, I become acutely aware that I speak only the coloniser’s language.
Click to expand images
In this sober frame of mind, I cross the soft barrier of the curtains, and as I enter the larger chamber I become conscious of a woody scent: I think cedar, though my companion on that day recalls eucalyptus—as with everything we experience here, the subjective senses take priority over the defining mind. We emerge into a dimly lit room constructed of raw, vertical timbers draped in red velvet. Gold-framed photographs hang around the perimeter. The centre holds a large round floor tile, tightly decorated with concentric rings, protected by a velvet rope. The voice of the artist singing “Kulein Mali” rises in the air. In the resonance of the vowels, I can hear the vast hollow dome of the Basilica where it was recorded. The yearning song is familiar but the words are not, and to my ear the language is opaque. This renders the song anew, speaking of another kind of life from the one the familiar melody has trained me to imagine.
I’ve puzzled over why Johnson included not only her performance of the song, but also the business of set up: we hear the clunk of the mic being placed and the murmur of speech as she addresses the audio technician. This is a moment where the structure of the artwork is revealed, just as the opulent velvet curtains are drawn back to reveal the humble wood behind. The audience is privy not only to the emotional peaks of the performance, but also the commonplace human diligence that makes it happen; the transcendent emotions evoked by the song are never detached from the singer and her social body.
The photographs mounted along the wall explore confrontation and concealment. The artist stands in a pale coat and bright ribbon skirt before the canals of Venice; she looks directly at the camera, and by proxy at the viewer; it is as if her severe gaze is radiating from the timbers. Around her, the gold gleams, the wood recedes in shadow, and the curtains glow red in the corners. On the right wall, one frame contains a trashcan superimposed against the canal—an Anthropocene footnote to the larger conversation about Indigenous self-expression and colonial constructs.
Finally, I walk to the centre of the room, ready to gaze at the disk behind the rope. It gives the impression of a cosmology: a seed blooming into a flower or the universe at the moment of the Big Bang. The outer edges are traced in red and gold paint, with a band of blue wave-like curves, and then a ring of L’nu hieroglyphs—an ancient writing system that predates European contact. Within that, there are two more rings of red and white geometry—triangles and parallelograms angled in opposing directions that give an illusion of movement; then a ring of five flowers, and a central ring containing more text written this time in Latin. The outer hieroglyphic text depicts the words to “Kuein Mali,” thus illustrating a comingling of ancient Indigenous and 19th-century European traditions, brought about by colonisation.
This collision of worlds is evident in the visual composition of the disc as well: at first glance I assumed that its red, white, and yellow geometry referenced Mi’kmaq traditions: the shapes brought to mind the 8-pointed star that is etched into the cliffs of Bedford, NS and that shows up in many traditional and contemporary Mi’kmaw designs, from quillwork to screenprinting. The blue waves allude to the artist’s journey across the Atlantic to Venice while also echoing a “double-curve motif” that recurs in Mi'kmaq art. This reading of Indigenous cultural references is complicated, though, by the fact that the disk also replicates the colours and patterns of floor tiles at the centre of the Basilica Santa Maria della Salute. The interior ring of five roses, which to my eye suggested Indigenous floral patterns, are of Venetian not Mi’kmaw origin. Like the song looping overhead, this object engages with the entangled histories of Indigenous and settler cultures.
My impulse to “misread” the visual influences on the disk is, I think, invited by the work. At the very centre of Johnson’s piece there is more script that roughly translates to the phrase "without truth there can be no reconciliation." The heart of this installation speaks explicitly to the rupture upon which our present culture is built. This phrase contrasts with the words in the Venetian cathedral, which say: "from the origin comes salvation, 1631". Johnson’s statement speaks back to the colonising, Christianising impulse of the original biblical verse, insisting on a new foundation.
The Basilica Santa Maria della Salute is dedicated to the figure of the Black Madonna, one of several rare but well known depictions of the mother of Christ as a black woman. The architecture of this cathedral mirrors her body. Johnson’s installation reimagines this symbol of maternal creation with language, symbols, and song that are rooted in Mi'kmaq culture, and the source material is transformed by this contact. If reconciliation is to be possible, this receptive posture, openness to truths that change society, must be embraced.
As I contemplate the sounds, images, and shapes of Emmitukwemk: The Visit the restless energy that I brought into the building stills within me and my senses become attuned to the room itself. The installation reorients my perception towards the possibility that something new might yet emerge from the difficult legacies of the past.
