Borrowing the title from a somatic ritual written by poet CAConrad, This dream pays for its space in my heart frames the featured artist’s work through poetics—a refusal to be in relation through the language of capital. Poetry exists in each repeated gesture throughout the exhibition; the marks, weavings, and chirps of the artists’ work encompass a poetic sensibility that undoes the logic and language of capital. Considering the fluid relationship between one’s body, the language it speaks, and how it navigates land and grief, the artists emphasise that these relationships are porous, and that sites of ancestral history hold memories and feelings.
Artists Derya Akay and Eve Tagny consider how histories of land are related to familial histories through the exploration of their personal lineages. Akay’s recent drawings and sculptures stem from their research into their familial lineage. Working with historical diagrams of Anatolian kitchens and their knowledge of Anatolian funerary practices, Akay employs the visual language of flowers and garlands, vessels and food, to conjure Turkey’s fascist history and destabilise the making of Turkish identity.
Tagny’s new installation questions the twin processes of land privatisation and resource extraction. Transforming materials from her ancestral home in Cameroon, Tagny considers the colonial impulse to commodify land through architectures of enclosure. The artist displays bronze cast seeds, assorted video works, and a cob pathway made of soil, sand, and clay sourced from the local landscape.
sophia bartholomew and Darby Minott Bradford engage with poetics as a framework for their sonic, sculptural and poetic interventions. Working from their cultural inheritance, bartholomew’s practice combines European myths with their personal histories, interweaving organic materials and mythology through an alchemical process. In this exhibition, bartholomew displays a grass weaving that acts as a kenning, a poetic element common to Norse stories in which the metaphoric potential between grass, hair, breath, and earth is revealed.
Bradford contends with their disdain for nature poetry through a poem of their own: a sound sculpture and interactive installation that plays a robin’s song. Attuning our ears to the banalities of our surroundings, Bradford’s Robin melody shows how a song affects our orientation to the places we move through, blending the rewilded sound of the landscape with the colonial sounds of industry so as to not erase one history with the other.
About Paradigmatic Pulse
This exhibition is the result of the inaugural Paradigmatic Pulse open call for curatorial proposals and was selected from over twenty submissions. As a curatorial incubator focused on contemporary curatorial practice, Paradigmatic Pulse aims to support experimental projects that are socially engaged, community-focused and critically rigorous. With an interest in (re)defining an emergent paradigm of curatorial practice, this program invites other types of discursive space into the gallery in ways that might challenge institutional processes, necessitating growth and change.
Katherine Jemima Hamilton is a curator, writer, and educator who was born and raised on unceded Ligwilda'xw territory. She moved to Toronto in 2014 to pursue a degree in art history at the University of Toronto. In 2019, she relocated to unceded Chochenyo Ohlone then Ramaytush Ohlone territory, also known as the Bay Area, to pursue a dual MA degree in Curatorial Practice and Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. Her research interests include feminism and technology, craft and ritual in contemporary frameworks, unsettling practices for Western colonial institutions, and exploring sound as a framework for working and living together. She has curated exhibitions for the CCA Wattis Institute, Root Division, Hashimoto Contemporary, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Italy), and curates nomadically across the Bay Area as a founding member of the curatorial collective Off Hours. She also collaborates as a curator for Dive Barn, a curatorial experiment on a barn in Mendocino County, CA. Her writing has been published by Variable West, CLOT Magazine, Collecteurs, Juxtapoz, and the CCA Wattis Institute. She teaches art history at the Oakland Public Library.
greta hamilton (she/they) is a writer and curator of Scottish and Ukrainian descent, residing as a settler on Sinixt tum xula’xw in Nelson BC. Their research considers queer, anarchist, and countercultural histories through land-based artistic interventions. Engaging with organic and social processes including bathing, fermenting, cooking, gardening, and weaving, their writing and curatorial practice considers the poetics and politics of quotidian rituals. Their essays and poems have appeared in C Magazine, esse, Public Parking, Peripheral Review, and Grain Magazine, among others. They are a founding member and former editor of Silverfish Magazine in Toronto. They received a BA from the Ontario College of Art and Design, and are an MA candidate in Art History at the University of Guelph.
Derya Akay (they/she, b. 1988, Turkey) is an interdisciplinary artist and cook. They have lived, worked, and gardened on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sk̲wx̲wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ nations since 2005. Derya explores the tension between preservation and decay, control and chance, trial and error. Their process-based artistic strategies embrace the realities of time and transformation using organic materials. Akay poetically interprets cooking as a metaphor for their studio practice. Derya enjoys dumpster diving, cooking for large groups, recalling dreams, reading novels, hacking and pirating, delving into code, alley walks, and studying weeds. Recently, they completed their "Girl Dinner" and "Estradiol Kitchen" projects at Pale Fire, Vancouver, BC and Moodswing Bar, New Westminster, BC respectively. In 2023, Derya was the Stonecroft Artist-in-Residence at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Recent exhibitions include "Flowers from a Story" at Unit 17, Vancouver (2024); "The Willful Plot", Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia (2023); The Toronto Biennial, Mississauga (2022) and "Meydan" at The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2021). They were longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award from West Coast & Yukon.
sophia bartholomew (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, descended from Norwegian immigrants on Treaty 3 territory (in rural Northwestern Ontario) and English and Irish settlers in and around so-called Toronto. Working outwards from the ruins and runes of their own cultural inheritance, their practice spans drawing, writing, sculpture and installation-making, video, performance, collaboration, and small, daily negotiations with found materials and household waste. Their work borrows its poetics from rural knowledge systems, including craft patterns and junk piles, folk stories and sagas, improvised adaptations and decisions of necessity. Born from experiences of intra-action and impermanence, their projects engage processes of transference and transformation, upholding queer practices of fluidity, adaptability, tenderness, hope, and love.
sophia has presented their work at C4RD in London, nGbK in Berlin, avecez art space in Havana, and at galleries and artist-run centres across Canada. They have attended residencies at The Khyber Centre for the Arts, Platform Centre, Banff Centre, the City of Calgary, and Medalta. Their writing has been published by C Magazine, Artforum, BlackFlash, Public Parking, Eastern Edge, The Bows, Canadian Art magazine, and Peripheral Review. Recent group exhibitions include grass taps at the plumb, Loose Parts at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, and All Flourishing Is Mutual with Images Festival in Toronto. sophia received their BFA from UBC in 2012 and their MFA from the University of Guelph in 2022. In 2023 they participated in Plug In ICA’s Summer Institute Slow Wonderings, led by Crystal Mowry and Maggie Groat.
Darby Minott Bradford (they/them) is a poet and translator. They hold a BA from Concordia University and an MFA from the University of Guelph. With on focus on research-creative and hybrid approaches, Bradford’s work emerges from lyric mediations of historically dominant narratives and personal interventions in the archive. They are the author of Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), an interdisciplinary memoir that explores the versioning aspects of Bradford and their family’s histories with abuse and trauma. The collection won the A.M. Klein QWF Prize for Poetry, was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, Governor General Literary Award and Gerard Lampert Memorial Award, and was longlisted for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Bradford's first translation, House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson (Brick Books, 2023), received the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award and John Glassco Translation Prize, and was shortlisted for the Governor General Literary Awards for French-to-English translation. Their most recent hybrid collection, Bottom Rail on Top (Brick Books, 2023), works to complicate prevailing conceptions of Blackness by staging one personal present alongside American histories of antebellum Black life. A Raymond Souster Award finalist, the book is a treasure hunt of sorts, employing "a poetics of vestige," as Katherine McKittrick has described it, where "Black worlds are, all at once, refuted and made visible, emptied out and sharply populated." Bradford lives and works in Tio'tia:ke (Montreal) on the unceded territory of the Kanienʼkehá:ka nation.
Eve Tagny is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist. Her practice considers gardens and disrupted landscapes as mutable sites of personal and collective memory — inscribed in dynamics of power, colonial histories and their legacies. Weaving lens-based mediums, installation, text and performance, she explores spiritual and embodied expressions of grief and resiliency, in correlation with nature’s rhythms, cycles and materiality.
Tagny has a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University and a Certificate in Journalism from University of Montreal. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Henry Art, Seattle; Ames Yavuz and PHOTO Australia, Australia; Murate and Gucci Gardens, Italy; MNBAQ, MAJ, Momenta Biennale, MAC Montréal and Centre Clark, Montreal; VAC, Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, and Franz Kaka, Toronto, . She has done live performances at the Swiss Institute, NYC; C.CAP, Winnipeg; Nuit Blanche 2023, Cooper Cole and Gallery 44, Toronto. She has been longlisted for the Sobey Award 2024, is the recipient of a GOG Award (2023), the Plein Sud Bursary (2020), the Mfon grant (2018), has been shortlisted for the Prix en art actuels MNBAQ (2023), Gala Dynastie (2023), CAP Prize (2018), the Burtynsky Photobook Grant (2018), the GOG Award (2020) and longlisted for the New Generation Photography Award (2022).
Images:
Header: Derya Akay, asters round the table (detail), 2024. Paper, chalk, dry pastels, oil pastels, glue, pins on foamboard, cedar artists frame. 121.9 x 121.9 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17, Vancouver. Photo by NK Photo, Vancouver.
Feature image: Installation shot of This dream pays for its space in my heart. Curated by ellipses collective (greta Hamilton and Katherine Jemima Hamilton). Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, 5 October 2024 – 26 January 2025. Photo by KWAG.
