The Counter/Self
Exhibition Essay by Mona Filip
The Counter/Self
Art Museum University of Toronto, 2023
To a certain extent, every self is performative—a cast of characters we can summon or shape to serve our needs as we face the world. We each contain potential multitudes that can express or withhold different sides of ourselves, adapt to specific contexts, determine or respond to a boundless range of human interactions, surmount or succumb to inner drives and outside pressures. Navigating the complexities of selfhood, agency, and representation, this exhibition brings together a group of Canadian artists who create and embody imaginative alter-egos to examine, perform, and subvert identity constructs. Transforming their appearance and staging complex images, videos, and installations, they expose and disrupt prejudices with regards to gender, race, ethnicity, and nationhood. Informed by cultural histories entwined within the artists’ life experiences, their counter/selves advance divergent perspectives that undercut deceptive national legacies and social expectations.
A member of the Siksika Nation, Adrian Stimson unsettles colonial narratives through humour and counter-memory, confronting historical oppression with fierce irreverence. Shattering stereotypes through transformative gestures that merge real and fictionalized notions, Buffalo Boy and The Shaman Exterminator are two recurring, intertwined alter-egos central to Stimson’s performance work. Derived from the artist’s ancestral worldview and honouring the centrality of the bison to Blackfoot spirituality and survival, they function as devices to dislocate, dispel, and alter entrenched oppressive outlooks. Upending colonial nostalgia, Stimson’s personas bring forth absented narratives, creating space to shape a new reality.
With similar strategies of dismantling colonial tenets, Stacey Tyrell examines identity, race, and heritage in the context of post-colonial societies and the Caribbean Diaspora. In her series Pour La Victoire (2015–17), she wears make-up and costume to pose as allegorical personifications of European and North American nations. Tyrell’s images perform a radical subversion, substituting her racialized body for the Eurocentric ideal, any signs of difference concealed. An irreconcilable disjunction lies beneath these symbols of nationhood, unmasking an effort to protect privilege and power under the cover of lies. Tyrell further transforms herself in Mistress and Slave (2018) to highlight opposing sides of her dual ancestry, Caribbean and European, creating a provocative image that lays bare constructed racial concepts and challenges the pervasive fiction of whiteness.
Exploring related concerns in a Québécois context, 2Fik deploys a group of recurring characters stemming from his experiences and inner tensions. Born in Paris to a Moroccan Muslim family, he later moved to Montréal, finding an environment that inspired him to examine identity and its socio-political ramifications. 2Fik’s performance as his main alter-ego, Ludmilla-Mary, a stylish, gender-bending character sporting a hijab and an abundant beard, asks viewers to confront their apprehensions and biases. Challenging cultural and social norms, Ludmilla-Mary strolls silently through public spaces raising questions about difference, otherness, and belonging, as captured in the Fanion (2019) panels. In a related series produced in Matane, she wanders the rural Québec landscape alone, searching for an elusive connection to her environment. Evoking a loneliness that may seem either sought as respite or inflicted by social rejection, the images remain ambiguous.
Informed by her nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), British, and Dutch ancestry, Meryl McMaster’s work uses intricate props, sculptural garments, and performance to create contemplative images that invite introspection. She brings viewers along on a journey of reflection, examining the inextricable entanglements of the self with the land, lineage, history, culture, and the more-than-human realm. In her prints from the series As Immense As The Sky (2019), the artist, spurred by the urgency to address our collective impact upon the environment, seeks wisdom in places of ancestral life and community. She shares her acquired understanding through a transformative, embodied process, articulating an urgent call to restore the precarious ecological balance that sustains our world.
Equally focused on ancestral histories, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory (Inuk) and Jamie Griffiths (Canada-UK) expose the colonial influence that perpetuates inequity for Inuit in their own homelands. In their work White Liar and the Known Shore: Frobisher and the Queen (2021), the two Iqaluit-based collaborating artists examine the impact of European incursions on Nunavut, adopting the personas of Sir Martin Frobisher and Queen Elizabeth I. Griffiths embodies the English explorer all dressed in white, exposing him as a White Liar upholding the fallacies of those in power. Williamson Bathory performs the Queen, donning white face to mimic her famous make-up while alluding to whitened bones—an Inuit mark of respect for ancestors. Her red and black flagstaff (colours significant to Greenlandic mask dance), Frobisher’s hat, and a piece of his “fool’s gold” complete the installation. The concept of Terra Nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, and Elizabeth’s naming of southern Baffin Island as “Meta Incognita” (The Unknown Shore) established a fictional reality that allowed explorers to callously claim Indigenous lands.
Brazilian-Canadian artist Helio Eudoro investigates the layers that envelop and reveal aspects of the self related to gender, sexuality, body image, diasporic experience, and social exclusion. His Mantos (2017–21) are a series of sculptures, performances, and installations made from deconstructed pieces of clothing stripped of associations with class, gender, sexuality, or body size. They reframe garments as fluid tissue freed from the pressures of industry and society, restoring and releasing the body. The sumptuous ceremonial robe in Manto N°5 – BATTLE AGAINST DESTINY – Moirai’s Fate Armour (2021) is a protective stand-in for the body on Judgment Day. The elements composing the vestment reference a multiplicity of rituals and roles.
With a similar intention to protect and mend, Sasha Shevchenko’s work stems from her experience of displacement as a Ukrainian immigrant. Her iterative installation Twice Bound, Once Removed, Born Quick, Born Tangled, (2021–22) is an object-based reflection on imagination as a tool for diasporic becoming. The work centres on a fragile alter-ego, Lyusterko (little mirror), who gradually emerges within the displays, taking shape at the cusp of presence and absence. Materializing from fragments, Lyusterko begins to articulate new origin stories, creating spaces of healing. Her recursive apparitions become a tribute to resilient hope, to trans-locality, and to persistent creation in times of tragedy that feel timeless.
Audacious or enigmatic, probing power structures, asserting belonging, or obscuring presence, the counter/selves reclaim space, protect the vulnerable, and reveal the deceptions of dominant discourses, counteracting their harmful sways. In all their incarnations, they epitomize resilience, resistance, and renewal.