Shadowed Scaffolds: on Joanne Bristol’s back issues (Ackerman)

It’s not unusual for artists to display their work outside of its expected home. I have seen exhibitions staged in closets, spare rooms, hotel rooms, basements, dilapidated retail spaces, the forest, deconsecrated churches, and crumbling theatres. Over the last couple of years, it seems like every garage in the GTA has become a project space for at least a couple of seasons. More often than not, this strategy springs from a desire to present work rather than an interest in investigating where art should be seen and how it is inflected by its setting. Usually a radiator, a wooden beam, or heating exchange system is something that adds a flavour of thrift to a space. I often joke that an artist-run centre without a pole in the centre of its main gallery can never really be an artist-run centre. These sediments from other spaces and previous functions are ubiquitous but often unexamined. I have seen work that gestures to these pasts but few that seek out and engage them with the precision and curiosity of Joanne Bristol’s back issues (Ackerman). This ongoing project is based on Bristol’s archive of past work, spanning her engagements across a wide spectrum of media, and was embedded in the storage space of her former home in the Ackerman building. Bristol presented the work for two days in the spring of 2022, guiding viewers into the basement of the building and presenting them with a bricolage of photographs, bookworks, performance ephemera, and found objects adorned with googly eyes. On the opposite wall, Bristol presented a rubbing of the brass plaque from the front of the building, which lays out its past as a warehouse for a harness maker and later for the Hudson’s Bay Company, as well as its status as a registered municipal heritage property.

Bristol situates this work at the intersection of personal artistic production and the larger histories of settler movement, colonial displacement, and capitalist expansion. This retrospective project is an acknowledgement of a long and fruitful practice, something that, for Bristol, is inseparable from the anxiety she associates with accumulating things to be packed, moved, placed, replaced, repacked, and moved again. As I stood discussing the work with Bristol and a few other viewers, I was struck by the density of thinking in the work, where multiple strands of investigation, curiosity, and urgent political concerns were presented as simultaneously autonomous and enmeshed.

At this point, I think I have moved more times than my parents have in their entire lives. It’s not a perfect metric (they lived different lives in a different time), but I still feel like too often I have contended with an existential number of moves during my life, and they show no sign of slowing down. Too often I have stood amongst a mountain of my things thinking: “What am I gonna do with all of this shit?” And that doesn’t even include studios. Entire weeks of my twenties were spent dragging ninety percent of my belongings to a neighbourhood thrift store in the scant days before an upcoming move. Like so many other people, I have a trail of stuff that leads back through my life–an extended anxiety of abandoned objects which is only intensified by the accumulation of things I have made. I sometimes wonder if the so-called “dematerialization of the art object” arose from a lack of storage space or from the itinerance of affordable housing and studios for artists.

Throughout the conversation, I contended with my long-held belief that framing the climate crisis as a consumer problem only helps to shift responsibility away from governments and the shameful lack of regulation that could help curb the recklessness and greed of manufacturing and resource extraction. I don’t believe it is possible to shop our way out of climate change, but I also feel a growing shame about my use of cheap, disposable materials over the years. In art school, we were taught not to worry about burning through newsprint and charcoal. It was more important to learn and develop through practice than to worry about waste. Now, when I haul around my boxes of what I think of as my archive, I also think of the shadow archive–the things that have gone into the bin, by my own hand or someone else’s–like a waking nightmare where my life’s work is featured on an episode of Storage Wars.¹

Bristol’s amalgam of material illuminates so many of the shadowed scaffolds that hold art practice in place. Along with the VHS copies of video work and etched glass plates from past installations, there are rolls of tape, research materials, and a copy of her PhD thesis. Tucked into the shallow wooden shelves of this basement, one can easily recognize the materials that might be relegated to the dressing room of artistic labour. Taken together, these materials constitute a kind of photo album—one that does not shy away from acknowledging its violent historical foundations.

In the writing that accompanied the installation, and in our conversation about the work, Bristol was quick to remind the assembled audience that as soon as we left the building we would step onto a street that is named after Edgar Dewdney. As Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Territories, Dewdney used starvation as a tactic of coercion against Indigenous nations who had been forced onto reservations and made dependent on government aid by the extermination of the bison.² The street that bears his name stands as a geographic boundary, with both historical and contemporary connections to economic and racial marginalization. If you head west along the street, you will come to the RCMP depot where Louis Riel was hung. If you drive east to Pilot Butte, you will eventually come to a small plot of land that belongs to the Zagime Anishinabek First Nation.

In the years since I moved to Regina, rates of drug and gang-related crime have increased in the neighbourhood just north of Dewdney avenue, known as North-Central. The neighbourhood is largely home to Indigenous people (compared to the rest of the city) and suffers under the weight of poverty and addiction. In my experience, the neighbourhood has been both a civic punching bag—perceived as responsible for soiling the reputation of the city³—and a proxy for citizens wanting to vent their racism. One of the biggest responses from the city has been the increased militarization of the Regina Police Service, including the purchase of a $375,000 armoured vehicle and a 1.2 million-dollar surveillance plane, while grass-roots community organizations compete for merger public funding or rely on volunteers to address the route problems of the neighbourhood. While steps could be taken to counteract the generations-long effects of poverty and state-enforced violence through disproportionate criminalization of Indigenous people, the settler government that refuses to change the name of Dewdney avenue seems content to reproduce the same atmosphere of antagonism, indifference, and violence that Edgar Dewdney is remembered for. 

When I look at some of Bristol’s early work, it’s not surprising that her version of a retrospective project is focused on questions of relation that are direct, oblique, or tangential. In a video from 1995 called videobut, she traverses the medium’s relationship to the physical body, the stress of hours spent editing, as well as the social function of learning new technologies for art making. The narrator tells the story of how she learned to edit from a woman in a small mountain village, and of the time they spent “slugging back diet coke and laughing hysterically…within three days we were going steady.” Through back issues (Ackerman) she continues to address the material realities of art practice as well as the social and political factors that inflect her thirty-year career.

Bristol makes use of language and writing to place ideas in complex proximities, drawing a careful viewer’s attention to unexpected or uncomfortable spaces. Through her gymnastic aptitude for new and different working methods, it’s clear Bristol is not an artist that misses an opportunity to move through multiple modes of art-making. With this new body of work, she thinks simultaneously along intertwined threads of personal, colonial, and environmental histories and highlights the inseparable conditions of presence, detritus, and art making. Bristol also unspools the conception of an archive as a plastic entity which can sit unchanged and unmarked by its surroundings. With this work, she situates her life and her practice in a Saskatchewan that remains deeply troubled. It serves as a reminder that—in the words of Bristol herself—“art should not be made alone. It’s impossible, anyway.”⁴

The project back issues (Ackerman) will continue with a series of multiples combining documentation of the installation and a series of texts written by the artist.

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Nic Wilson (he/they) is an artist and writer who was born in the Wolastoqiyik territory now known as Fredericton, NB in 1988. They graduated with a BFA from Mount Allison University, Mi’kmaq territory, in 2012, and an MFA from the University of Regina, Treaty Four Territory, in 2019 where he was a SSHRC graduate fellow. He has shown work across Canada and internationally at Third Space Gallery, Art Mûr, the Remai Modern, Modern Fuel, and Venice International Performance Art Week. Their work often engages time, queer lineage, and the distance between art practice and literature. Their writing has appeared in publications such as BlackFlash Magazine, Headlights Anthology, Peripheral Review, Border Crossings, and PUBLIC. [www.nicwilson.org]

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1. A reality TV show which focuses on a rotating cast who bid on storage units that have been repossessed when the renters are unable to make payments or abandon the units. The bidders hope to resell the contents of the units and make a profit based on very little information about what the unit contains. The drama of the show is based on the possibility of finding expensive antiques or luxury handbags in a pile of crumpled boxes. It is presented as a kind of gold rush of late capitalism where the cast wades through the detritus of material culture hoping to find a bright spot, something whose value has persisted in an ocean of junk.
2. James W. Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2019), 114-115.
3. A 2007 MacLean’s article called “Canada’s Worst Neighbourhood” by Jonathon Gatehouse continues to haunt North-Central’s reputation. The article’s title is crass and sensational, as though it were the result of some sadistic pageant, and I empathize with the residents of North-Central who felt preyed upon by the publication. I cannot find the same empathy for people who’s greatest concern was that the article made Regina look bad while doing little to nothing  to address the substantive issues that the piece raised.
4. Joanne Bristol, videobut, 1995, video, 5m20s.