ImagiNation

Here's a great quotation from Litany for the Homeland, a story by the Australian writer, Janette Turner Hospital):

No little man from Customs and Immigration stands at the doors of memory or imagination demanding to see your passport.

Last week I went to an exhibition at the Carleton University Art Gallery that seemed to explore that theme, entitled ImagiNation: New Cultural Topographies. There were six exhibits, each one making some comment on the lack of belonging or, paradoxically, the togetherness felt by people who have in one way or another been displaced from their homeland. I'll take them in the order I found them; it's an attractive gallery that I entered on the upper level and from above, the first installation that caught my eye was Gerard Choy's One Ton of Won Ton Bowls (2003) laid out on the floor. The title quite literally meant what it said. 279 identical won ton bowls had been set in concrete and painted blue; together they weighed 1 imperial ton. To appreciate the symbolism of this you have to know that this kind of bowl was first produced in the 19th century for Chinese people who had moved overseas. The colour is significant too, chroma-key blue being used in the film industry for screens onto which anything can be projected. Blue bowls are also a reminder of traditional Chinese porcelain.

At the bottom of the stairs from the upper gallery was a video installation, again dated 2003, featuring four flat screens, two of which were showing scenes from Orange County, California, the other two showing Orange County, Beijing, its deliberate, fashionable imitation. The same Asian man walked along the residential street past the same houses. There was no clue as to which country was which.

A video by Jin-Me Yoon was more disturbing, showing a Korean woman (the artist herself, 46 years old) lying face-down on a low, wheeled plank like a skateboard, propelling herself painfully along the streets of Seoul by means of her hands (in bandages) and feet, from the U.S. Embassy to the Japanese Embassy. Other people including several in uniform appear in the video, all of them ostentatiously ignoring her.

Against the wall was a huge 3-dimensional exhibit by Lucie Chang—and there's a multi-cultural name if ever there was one, even more striking when you read that she was born in Guyana—she calls the artwork entre-deux larmes, and it's a response to the immigrants whom she interviewed, one by one, in preparation for this work. The predominant colour is grey although some aquamarine colours are interspersed and a few bright bubbles (?) of video here and there. From a distance it looks like an underwater pool with hanging weeds, ripples, fish perhaps. When you come closer you see that each of the shapes is an eye in tears or a tear drop. As a friend of mine said, impossible to describe. You have to see it.

In the next room is The Hive Dress(2003) constructed by a collective from Montreal's garment-making district which has a predominantly immigrant population. Ribbons of various shades of pink / red are woven into a giant beehive structure, with some discarded on the floor, and on the back of the used ribbons quotations from the immigrant women are incorporated, each statement saying something about their "dreams and disappointments". I explored inside the rather claustrophobic beehive to decipher a few thoughts about missing family members.

Also included in the exhibtion was Frank Shebageget's Small Village. This artist is strictly speaking not an immigrant at all, but an Ojibway artist born and brought up in Thunder Bay, but his message about "cultural intersections ... alienation ... memory ... shifting communities ... history's silences and counter-narratives"—the subject of this exhibition—fits right in. The "village" is 39 identical model houses neatly placed on three shelves like rows of boxes. Each plywood house has one small window in the side wall, one window and a basic door in the front wall, modelled on the ugly, government issue, "Indian House" that native people were obliged to construct on their reservations.