Emily Neufeld, Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby (install view), 2020. Courtesy of Michael Love.
PRAIRIE INVASIONS: A HYMN | EMILY NEUFELD
18.02.2022 to 24.04.2022
Opening Reception | February 18 at 7 PM
Breaking Down a Hymn
Emily Neufeld’s work is an unhurried look at how things have, and do, interact. It’s an invitation into observation. A tracing of the complex web of interactions between the people, places and patterns of thought that followed in the wake of European colonisation of Canada.
In the interventions she performs in forgotten, abandoned spaces, and the sculptural formulations they finally take on, there is a mnemonic recall, a digging down through the strata of history. Dionne Brand touches on this process when she says, “One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives. Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be observed is relative to that history.”
Far from approaching history, both familial and societal, from the position of a detached spectator, Neufeld instead pulls up a chair and invites the viewer to sit down with her alongside the history loitering in ruins, and reckon with our collective haunted inheritance.
We are in the midst of a breakdown of the historic and ongoing practice of sidelining our factual past and replacing it with national stories of denial and innocence. We can, however, rethink the necessity and utility of breakdowns as Alain De Botton does: “[Breakdowns are] an attempt by one part of our mind to force the other into a process of growth, self-understanding and self-development that it has hitherto refused to undertake.”
Part of our current breakdown rests on our refusal to shift ourselves away from an “invasive species” mentality. Plants fall roughly into three categories: native, introduced, and invasive. Introduced species integrate into a native environment without negatively affecting surrounding ecosystems. Invasive species, by contrast, are characterised by the harm they cause through over consumption of resources and direct attacks on native species. Neufeld’s work offers us a way to think about our legacy as an “invasive species” and how to orient ourselves towards becoming an “introduced species”, one who at minimum does not actively harm this ecosystem, but who, instead, lives up to our infinite potential to be a positive addition to this place we call home.
Neufeld uses certain plant and animal species to open up wider conversations around colonial legacies that resulted in complex consequences for multiple species in our ecosystem. Brown-Eyed Susans crop up in several places in the show. They are native to the prairies and were used medicinally by Indigenous communities to treat parasitic worms, snakebites, minor cuts, scrapes, and burns. The construction of farms across the prairies destroyed much of the Brown-Eyed Susan’s natural habitat. Despite this, Brown-Eyed Susans have not been completely eradicated, but still grow plentifully in the ditches alongside roads, a painful parallel to the way Indigenous people were pushed into geographic margins or, in the case of the Metis Nation in Alberta, pushed off their lands and forced to construct temporary encampments on road allowances.
In Beatch’s House, Brown-Eyed Susans are meticulously pinned to the wall, following the pattern of the wallpaper beneath. This intervention is an honorific to the spirit and labour of tough settler prairie women, but it’s an honorific acknowledging the part they, wittingly or otherwise, played in the larger story of colonialism and conquest. Pinning the Brown-Eyed Susans atop the wallpaper is a way to side-step the dogged relativism that divorces the lives of prairie women from the facts of colonialism. Even the new title of the show, a subtle shift in word choice — from Prairie Invasion: A Lullaby to Prairie Invasion: A Hymn — is an echo of that same call to love and respect your community while also, out of that same love, hold them accountable.
Neufeld's work holds space for multiple kinds of storytelling. Space enough for layered stories that are loving, nostalgic, reverent, implicating, and critical. There’s enough space for all the complexity and contradiction because it stems from a deep respect for the people whose stories bedrock her work. No one is let off the hook within Neufeld’s work, but no one is labelled an irredeemable monster either.
Text by Nura Ali
Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator
Prairie Invasions was previously presented at the Richmond Art Gallery in August 2020.
Emily Neufeld was born in Alberta, on Treaty 6 and 7 lands, and now lives and works on the unceded territory of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam in North Vancouver. Her practice investigates place, and how humans change and are changed by the surrounding environment, and the layers of memory and psychic history that accumulate in a material world. In addition to collaborative projects with other artists, recent solo exhibitions include Before Demolition (2017: Burrard Arts Foundation), and Picture Window (2016: Vancouver Heritage Foundation), a large-scale billboard on the CBC Wall in downtown Vancouver. Neufeld has created and participates in community sharing gardens, and sees land as fundamental to her research process. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2013.
This exhibition was made possible with funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.
Thank you to our volunteers and sponsors who assisted with this exhibition.
Victoria Lasalle
Dominique Marcil
Ian Thompson