Belle Park & Isabel Bader Centre, 26-30 August 2023
curated by Laura Murray, Dorit Naaman, and Erin Sutherland
Unearthed
Unearthed was a series of artistic installations, conversations, and experiments that sought to reveal or imagine some of the stories of Belle Park. From August 26-30 2023, six artists brought diverse perspectives to connect the history of the park with contemporary social and environmental concerns and experiences. They helped us think about way-finding, home, identity, play, plants, and the land we stand on.
Artists Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Vince Ha, Noah Scheinman, and Evalyn Parry activated spaces in Belle Park on various days throughout the week through music and temporary installations.
An exhibition at Art and Media Lab in the Isabel Bader Centre ran concurrently showing work by Jung-Ah Kim, Elyse Longair, and Vince Ha.
Together, the art in the gallery and in the park suggested ways of engaging with this rich space with an uncertain future.
Noah Scheinman, Lawncare
Artist Statements
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Can I Rest in Your Shade? is a two-part installation which focuses on the weeping willows at Belle Park. This work explores crucial questions that can be extended to places and interactions beyond the park: what does it mean to be, and is it possible to be, a non-native entity and also a generous caretaker of the land? And, how do we ask others to look after us? By leaning on the willows as examples, the artist examines the resonant challenges of what it means to be Vietnamese in Canada—that is, what it means to be ornamental in this landscape and what it means to be defined by our labour.
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Tiny Universe examines Belle Park's history and nature by cultivating and visualizing microbial ecosystems from its mud. Shifting away from human-centric perspectives, or even visible animals or plants, the hidden world of microorganisms and their intricate environmental relationships. Winogradsky Columns are used to cultivate microorganisms and track pH data. Then, a digital growth simulator is created, enriching the visualization of the microbial ecosystem. This study of microbes' vital role in nutrient recycling aligns with the broader Belle Park Project's goal of illuminating environmental resistance, resilience, and land re-naturalization, revealing a vibrant life despite the site's toxicity.
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Artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle invites community members to gather for a musical engagement with the Belle Park totem pole and the land it stands on. She will invite audience members to offer thoughts, knowledge, and words in Indigenous languages as part of the performance.
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Belle of the Ball is a series of cyanotypes and a zine created during the week of the solstice. Cyanotype, to put it simply, is drawing by the sun. Essentially, you place an object or negative on paper or cloth treated with a special photosensitive solution. When exposed to sunlight, the magic happens, and your sun print is created: a white image silhouetted on a blue background. I focused on capturing plants that I considered were the Belle’s of the Ball in Belle Park. Each cyanotype carries a history, a trace, a relationship from the land they were taken from, and the sunlight used to create them. To me, that’s a beautiful thing.
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Using a somatic research method I call walkingsingingthinking, I have composed a short song-cycle of interconnected songs, organized around each of four historical worlds within the Belle Park site: The Wetland, The Dump, The Golf Course and The Urban Park. Informed by the practice of walking, as a tool for gathering sensory information, also responding to research materials, each song takes the perspective of one of the site’s more-than-human beings. The project will culminate in a live concert performance in the park, where, through the perspectives of beavers, poplar trees, birds and fish, I explore and express some of the histories, life-worlds and meanings that live today in Belle Park.
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LAWNCARE is a series of site-responsive sculptures that take as their starting point the forms of attention that shape landscapes according to specific desires and protocols. The “lawn” is not found in nature, but actively produced through the complex interplay of culture, ecology, and politics, and the type of care it receives reflects the societal values of a given time and place. Drawing on Belle Park’s former use as both municipal landfill and public 9-hole golf course, the project combines groundskeeping techniques such as mowing with repurposed industrial geosynthetic fabrics used in environmental engineering, and the experimental visualization of subsurface data with golf’s material language of flags, pins and hazards to define a new choreography of the space which focuses attention on lesser-known and unseen episodes sedimented within the site’s entangled histories of earth and time.
Artist Bios
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Vince Ha is a writer-director who captures fragmentary moments and uses them to challenge issues of race, class, gender, and representation. He is pursuing his Ph.D. in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University, centering his research on two core themes: diasporic identities and queer archival methods. Currently, he is investigating transnational media and its relationship with queer diasporic sociality, with special attention to homoerotic representation in Asian cinema. His work has been presented locally at Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, Gardiner Museum, Buddies in Bad Times, The ArQuives, and Hot Docs Rogers Cinema—and internationally in China, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Thailand, United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.
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Jung-Ah Kim (She/her) is a filmmaker/researcher/curator based in Canada. She studies Korean textiles and experiments with material conditions and processes of both digital and craft media. She is pursuing a PhD through the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies Program at Queen’s University.
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Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Half Breed; German/Polish) is an award-winning and community-engaged interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter and critical thinker whose family is from Papaschase First Nation / amiskwaciy wâskahikan (Edmonton, AB) and Kikino Metis Settlement. Her work investigates and attempts to articulate an intersection of nêhiyawin (Cree worldview) with contemporary time-place by incorporating sound, Indigenous language(s), music, plus old and new technologies. Her current ongoing projects include: Why the Caged Bird Sings, a collaborative songwriting project with incarcerated women, men and detained youth; nîpawiwin ohci, a series of immersive installations created to evoke embodied concepts towards solidarity and inclusion; yahkâskwan mîkiwahp (aka light tipi) ‒ a participatory action ‘virtual’ tipi made of light and sage smudge (with Joseph Naytowhow); and Singing Land – a multi-iterative international songwriting/sonic mapping project where she “sings land” as a process of personal treaty-making. She is currently a PhD candidate at SMARTlab/UCD in Dublin, Ireland.
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Elyse Longair is an artist, curator and image theorist, currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. In 2021, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at OCAD University. Longair’s research focuses on collage history, collage as research creation and institutional strategies of collecting and curating collage. Her ‘simple image’ theory in collage re-imagines the role of images away from the overt complexity that dominates our world, opening up new possibilities for imagined futures.
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Evalyn Parry is a songwriter and theatre-maker. Her award-winning, interdisciplinary work has toured nationally and internationally; recent productions include Kiinalik:These Sharp Tools (Teatro A Mil, Chile; Edinburgh International Festival); SPIN (a musical work about the feminist history of the bicycle, currently being adapted for film); Gertrude and Alice (a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama); The Dialysis Project by Leah Lewis, (RCAT Newfoundland), The Youth/ Elders Project (Buddies). Evalyn has released five albums of music and spoken word and is the recipient of the Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award (Ontario Arts Council), The KM Hunter Award for Theatre and The Ken McDougall Award for Directing. Evalyn served as Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad TImes Theatre in T’karonto / Toronto from 2015 to 2020. She was the 2022/23 Walker Cultural Leader at Brock University’s Department of Dramatic Arts, and is currently finishing her MA in Cultural Studies at Queen’s; her research explores connections between leadership, creative practice, decolonial futures and systems change.
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Noah Scheinman is a multidisciplinary artist and designer with interests that span ecology, architecture, technology, landscape, and geological time. His creative work has been presented in various group contexts, and in 2020 he had a solo exhibition at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in Kingston. Scheinman was Emerging Artist in Residence at the Banff Centre (2020) and has participated in experimental residencies organized by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (2021), and Artscape’s Creative Placemaking Lab in Ottawa (2020). Before completing a Master of Visual Studies in Studio Art at the University of Toronto, he studied literature and critical theory at McGill University, and sculpture at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In parallel to his current artistic projects, which include the production of a feature-length film on forests and the timber industry and a large-scale public artwork for the City of Ottawa, he is working towards a PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, where he researches the political ecologies of infrastructure and logistics in so-called Canada and beyond.