Deep Horse Archive: D St-Amour in Conversation With Hazel Meyer

I grew up near horses, in a rural place, working class, horse- and farm-adjacent, but I was not a horse girl. I was a desperately shy child with braces and long, straw-blonde hair. On a class trip in grade school to a ranch in rural southwestern Ontario, a horse mistook my hair for a snack, gently gnawing it behind my back while I absently fretted about something or other, until her hard flat teeth found the lobe of my ear. We both startled at the accidental intimacy. I’ve been shy of horses since, but in the same way I am shy of the ocean—admiring, and respectfully fearful. I admired the horse girls, like the one who sat in front of me in 7^th grade. I admired her long, thick, dark hair, which would never be mistaken for hay. Girls in that grade used Mane ‘n Tail. They collected horse stickers and traded from their folders. They had birthday parties in stables and fields. I was merely horse-adjacent. Horse-curious. I was more of a book guy.

I remain horse-curious and am also still a book guy, which is maybe why I was sent a copy of Hazel Meyer’s DEEP HORSE TEXTS. It was sent to me by Natasha Chaykowski, who commissioned the project during her time as Curator at The Bows in Calgary, AB.

DEEP HORSE TEXTS is the outcome of several false starts and the circumnavigation of a range of complex hurdles.¹ Chaykowski moved to Alberta in 2014 and was taken by its particular rituals, especially the Stampede. After trying and failing to connect with its organizers to collaborate on a project with the gallery, Chaykowski decided to initiate an offsite project–an off-grounds stampede extravaganza, an attempt to enjoin the art world and the Stampede’s madding crowd in some form of mutual aid. She was toying with the term “inaugural” when she reached out to Meyer to take part in the new residency.²

In response, Meyer concocted a kind of Stampede inversion: “an equine-focussed spectacle, but with the humans performing for the horses, while sharing space.” Long-planned but crowded out by the pandemic, the spectacle was replaced by the DEEP HORSE ENCOUNTER: a private sharing of space between queer and horse—a notorious pairing—and a rumination on wildness, the care and beauty of consensual submission—human and horse, horse and human. To preserve the primacy of the encounters, the evidence of what transgressed is shared very minimally in DEEP HORSE TEXTS—appearing only in reference or grainy disposable-cam contact sheets.³

DEEP HORSE TEXTS is a hybrid document and almanac, recto-verso reader and idiosyncratic calendar. Like many (all?) of Hazel’s projects, it features Meyer’s signature script, a heavy hand-drawn serif, across both its covers. Hazel’s font also labels the date headers, which alternate between standard calendar fare and horse vernacular. January, February, Mustang, Appaloosa; Monday, Tuesday, Whinnies, Threats, Friday, Seabiscuit, Shoulder. Over a few weeks, Meyer sent me the various documents that comprise the DEEP HORSE canon: the image and text collection that, combined with some writing by Meyer, became the Primer, which was sent to the Encounters participants and the writers for DEEP HORSE TEXTS, and a photo of the dress code notice at the Mine Shaft, a leather bar and private club in NYC that operated between 1976-85, which inspired the DEEP HORSE DRESS CODE, a large-scale poster riff printed on biblically-thin white paper in Meyer’s serif. There is a lot of material in DEEP HORSE TEXTS; there’s more still in its conceptual margins.

DHT presents as a cross-section of the range of publications that it riffs on: the Farmer’s Almanac, the Whole Earth Catalog, and New Women’s Survival Catalog, to name a few.  Meyer mentions her partner Cait McKinney’s work and thinking around the 1960s and ‘70s Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand’s iconic back-to-land DIY tome. There is something of the Catalog in DEEP HORSE, as a collection of critical and quasi-utopian narratives together under the same header. DHT repeats one image in various forms; each time the image is turned around it evokes a new subject—queer allegory, land history, land back, oil money-wrought hypocrisy in the arts, class politics, desire and abjection, plain and complex erotics, community and solitude, both, Alberta, wherever. Like both the Catalog and The Old Farmer’s Almanac, its hybrid format is able to represent a cross-section of its authors’ desires (earth, people, crops, animals) and evoke a kind of permissiveness around the publication’s potential uses.

Meyer’s work in and around archives has also made archives: DHT both draws from and is an archive of its own making. As I tried to find the right questions to ask Hazel that might be helpful to interested readers, I kept thinking about a metaphoric malapropism a friend confidently asserted to me, back when we were colleagues: “You can teach a horse to swim, and that’s all you can do,” she said, as we walked out of a meeting. When I reminded her that horses already knew how to swim, she repeated, “…that’s all you can do.”

— Danielle St-Amour

Interview

D St-Amour (D) – In Natasha’s opening, she mentions that this project took its time to come together—some of the cancelled versions included a “horse-based residency” and an “interpretive equine performance.” I am wondering if you can talk a bit about how it felt to move through this time and the changes to your project, how the project translated from something so hyper-present and spectacle-oriented (a Stampede side-show), to something so intimate and dispersed (a book).

Hazel Meyer (H) –  Tracing the path of DEEP HORSE TEXTS always feels messy, like, I’m not sure what to include and leave out. I suppose this is part of what happens when a project is four years in the making, during which time the budget went from being a few hundred dollars to being way more flush, and then, with Natasha leaving The Bows and, of course, the pandemic. Oh, and I moved out of Canada and back during all of this as well. All the twists and turns feel hyper significant to how things played out. Like, we got a very generous CIP [Community Initiative Project] grant from the Alberta government right before the huge buzz-kill conservative Jason Kenney was voted in. I feel like we really slid in there before a tonne of arts funding got cut, and while people were still willing to take a chance on a kind of “community” project that had no true deliverables beyond being very queer, being in proximity to horses and thinking about the pathways and politics of care. So when that version of DHT was ultimately undoable, I still very much wanted to keep the spirit of using this money to provide experiences for queer folks to be alongside horses, with no real deliverables other than simply being with. It felt almost rebellious, or even political to spend the money in this way. Also, the pandemic and all the various restrictions allowed for a kind of freedom in how we used the money, which feels like a bizarre thing to say given how deeply it also created so many restrictions for so many.

Even when DHT was set to be a performance, there was always going to be a kind of paper-based multiple that would go with it. Something that was going to riff on the kind of paper culture that already exists in the Stampede, like handbills, flyers, posters, pamphlets.⁴

D – Can you talk about the Encounters?

DEEP HORSE ENCOUNTERS was a prompt given to 5 queer artists/writers living on Treaty 7 lands to basically spend time with a horse. They were asked to choose a “bubble”⁵ partner who would accompany them and have a camera to not necessarily document the encounter, but be alongside this gathering of human and horse.

A DEEP HORSE PRIMER⁶ was mailed to them, along with a disposable camera, and the bubble received this letter,⁷ which has a series of prompts for them. I was never interested in the bubble’s role being that of a documenter; I wanted them there for companionship, to share in thedriving if that was a part of this horse day, to be a willing witness to this day. These prompts ask them to make decisions and insert their own experiences into and onto the film. 

In return for this DEEP HORSE ENCOUNTER, the participants were asked for a reflection of some sort, whatever they wanted, whatever felt relevant or meaningful. I had originally imagined that these reflections would work their way into the Almanac or even onto the website, but in the end, their encounters are presented by contact sheets of their photographs. Only Adrian Stimson’s reflection, a text called The Horses are in the Yard!, exists in the publication. It beautifully walks through his own relationship with horses to that of horses and the Blackfoot peoples.

The reflections were absolutely gorgeous, and maybe it was selfish of me not to share them, but, and maybe this goes back to my absolute delight in not feeling particularly beholden to a set of deliverables, I didn’t feel the intention of the whole DHE was to show; it was to be with these animals.

We were able to pay a really nice fee for the artist and bubble, along with travel and accommodations if needed, a fee for a handler and for the privilege of being with a horse for a day. It felt important to have this encounter really financially padded, partially because this always feels good and what should always be strived for, but also because there was no real outcome other than spending time, and that has value, and my hope was for Cindy (and Rosie), Rita (and Susan), Adrian (and Happy), oualie & Clare, and malidi (and Connor) to feel that.

D – What was the invitation to the writers? Did they know the shape the book would take on invitation, or did the format come as a response to the texts?

It was a very loose invitation that relied heavily on trust.⁸ The 12 texts came together over about a year and a half. The invitation would change depending on my relationship with the person. There was only one real cold call, and that was to Cheryl Foggo. She received what was the most formal of invitations, including follow-up Zooms, etc…

I knew the title DEEP HORSE TEXTS from the beginning, so that was always there as an anchor. I would then try and describe what I was trying to do with the project, which I must say I always have a hard time doing when I’m in it. At first I would go back to the language we used in our grant applications, but that inevitably felt inadequate, and too heavy and stale for something that was actively trying to figure itself out.

I often came to folks with an idea of what they could do, which they could then take or leave. I know I like working this way, with a bit of structure to then press up against or lean into. Knowing I wanted 12 texts, what was clear from the beginning was how much money we had to give people, meaning how long their texts could be.

The invitation to Elaine Miller had this in it… “there needs to be something a bit sweatier and sexier in it. Something that is horse-adjacent, but like denim- and leather-focussed…”With Cheryl Foggo, I had just watched her John Ware film, as well as having just read Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” so her invitation was one based on whether she would want to engage in a bit of “critical fabulation” regarding John Ware. It felt huge that she was willing to go there, that she trusted the project enough to try something out. Jon Davies and Logan MacDonald had worked together years ago for a C Mag[azine] project, “LEZBROS FOR LEZBOS,”⁹ so that felt like a perfect fit.

D – Beyond the perhaps obvious connections, was there something that appealed to you about the format of the Almanac?

The form of the Almanac provided such a welcome structure to a project whose like star sign felt like chaos. I wanted the structure of the 12-month calendar, so knowing that there would be 12 texts, 12 images. Cait has done a bunch of work thinking alongside Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog movement,¹⁰ mostly in the context of thinking, like, beyond it as a starting place for certain thoughts and developments about the internet, so I was familiar with that world. The New Woman’s Survival Catalog is another one that was in the reference stack, but also the more mass-market classic The Old Farmer’s Almanac that you’ll see hanging near the register at a hardware store. It has a hole punched through all the pages, in the top left corner near the glued spine, for easy display, but also I imagine to always have it at hand, like one would a tool, or a reference book. The mix of papers, a glossy outer and newsprinty insides, but with some glossy inserts, which are mostly ads for tomato plants that produce fruit the size of terriers, and other delightful oddities. My favourite being things like a perforated-edge mail-in card for a yearly subscription to, I dunno, Tractor Hoarder… and all of this is nestled between information about things like the best time to plant seedlings, which often shares space with something a bit more eccentric such as the best time (moon phase? season?) to have your hair cut.

The Almanac felt like the best structure to hold DHT in the messiness of its coming to. Like the texts and the images could hold all that refracted from the project, and from the prompt that brought people to it, like what kind of affinities can we chart towards and with horses, and like, does experience with, or proximity matter (no!).

Ha, also, one more thing, I wanted it to be a calendar to sort of implicate it within people’s lives, to provide a service, the charting of days, in return for hopefully engaging with and reading the texts. Sure, it’s a 2023 calendar, so there’s a timeline for it on a wall, but I liked that too, it will always, quite loudly, announce itself as a product of that time, and hopefully slip onto a shelf and live out its life as a book after that.

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D St-Amour (they/she) is a writer, book-maker, and recovering curator. Since 2011, St-Amour has held curatorial, administrative and research positions at a range of institutions, including the AGO, The Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre, Art Metropole in Toronto, and Galerie SBC, Montreal. St-Amour regularly writes about artists’ books and publishing practices through the lens of visual arts and media history, and publishes queer sci fi and speculative fiction through their slow-press project, specific.place, with co-editor S.F. Ho. St-Amour holds an MA in Art History/ Visual Cultures at York University, and is currently an MLIS candidate at Western University in London.

1. I really tried to avoid horse metaphors while writing this, sorry, but horse and human history are so entwined. As such, (in metaphor-laden English, the only language I can speak for) the horse may be second only to baseball in its use as an analogic device. -D
2. magine, an annual stampede artist residency. -D
3. In our exchanges about the project, Hazel asked, “If time is spent with a horse, but nothing gets documented, does it make a sound…?”
4. You can view some of these here:  https://deephorsetextsprimer.tumblr.com/post/657913525427208192
5. Bubble is basically a “pod”. Early in the pandemic, we were told to limit our socialization to a few select friends/family members, or “pods,” a kind of accountability protocol. -D
6. https://www.deephorsetexts.com/primer#
7. “Hello!

   You are the DEEP HORSE BUBBLE of someone who has been invited to have a DEEP HORSE ENCOUNTER. Thank you for being a part of this project.

   This camera is for you to use over the course of your DEEP HORSE day. There are 27 exposures in total, and as a way of inscribing yourself onto this DEEP HORSE ENCOUNTER I have put together 10 prompts for you, the BUBBLE, to do. You can do them all at the beginning of the roll, or you can pepper them through the rest of the images. Whatever you like!

   What the other 17 images will be is up to you and your person who will be having the DEEP HORSE ENCOUNTER. It can be documentation in a traditional sense, collaboration in the most expansive sense, as well as all the modalities that exist between these two points. I hope your day spent in proximity to a horse will be both surprising and fun!

   Please get in touch if you have any questions.

   Truly,

   Hazel”

8. I also sent people either a hard copy or PDF of the DEEP HORSE PRIMER. I just remembered this… funny it slipped my mind until now. -H
9. https://jondavies.ca/Lezbros%20for%20Lezbos.pdf
10. https://hazelmeyer.com/Tools-for-the-Feminist-Present-w-Cait-McKinney-2016

This article is published in issue 40.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue