HOLD FAST: Holding it Down at Eastern Edge Gallery

HOLD FAST festival ran from August 19-24, 2024 in St. John’s, NL

Reviewed by Eva Crocker

HOLD FAST, Eastern Edge Gallery’s annual contemporary arts festival coincided with the gallery’s fortieth anniversary this August. A week of workshops concluded with the cherished Fancy Artist Talks, where the festival’s featured artists were invited to give a fifteen-minute presentation on their work, which was then displayed throughout downtown St. John’s for the festival’s Art Crawl.

Melissa Tremblett, opened the Fancy Artist Talks announcing, “Guys, I just painted a mural!” as she collapsed into one of three mismatched armchairs in the front of the room with splotches of paint decorating her hands and forearms. She seemed flushed with the rush of having completed an enormous project. Tremblett’s warm demeanor and genuine, down to earth approach to discussing her work set the tone for the rest of the night. Tremblett said there was a time when she and her work were consumed by the weight of the horrific, ongoing impacts of colonialism on Indigenous peoples in Canada, and Newfoundland and Labrador more specifically. She went on to say that more recently she has shifted her focus to looking at the strength of Indigenous peoples and creating works that celebrate her culture.

As part of this turn in her practice, Tremblett has been researching Innu caribou coats, an art form that was almost lost due to forced settlement along with other effects of colonialism. Tremblett  explained that caribou coats were traditionally made by the women of a family, who embroidered images that came to a hunter in his dreams onto the garments.

Tremblett showed images of caribou coats followed by pages from her sketchbook where she had created her own interpretations of the motifs featured on the coats. Next, she showed images of her experimentation with applying these interpretations to different mediums, including tattoos, pillows, a t-shirt and a mural on Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus. Tremblett’s HOLD FAST 2024 mural covers a huge swath of the outside wall of Eastern Edge, an intricate design is painted with striking precision in bold red, blue and yellow which are vibrant against a white background.  

Tremblett’s powerful adaptations of the caribou coat motifs resonated with Sarah Khraishi and Beck MacLeod’s Co-Creating Homeland, which looks at Palestinian Tatreez as cultural resistance to colonization and genocide. During their presentation, Palestinian-Newfoundlander Khraishi explained that Tatreez is a form of Palestinian embroidery traditionally used to adorn women’s clothing, which often incorporates motifs that represent the landscape of the particular village in Palestine where it was created. She went on to say that for some, Tatreez has come to symbolize a fierce rejection of Israel’s failed attempts to eradicate Palestinian people and culture. For their ongoing project, Co-Creating Homeland, Khraishi and Jewish Newfoundland-based artist MacLeod, teach community members to stitch Tatreez and invite them to use the techniques to incorporate motifs from Newfoundland’s landscape into a tapestry that investigates themes of labour, belonging, ownership and resistance. As part of the Art Crawl, Khraishi and MacLeod carried the tapestry during the weekly Palestine Action YYT march. At the demonstration, Khraishi gave an eloquent and passionate speech about the role of diasporic art during genocide and the importance of mobilizing on all possible fronts for a FREE PALESTINE. 

 

D’Arcy Wilson introduced her installation Lost Curlew, by explaining that as a descendent of Europeans in so-called Canada, she finds herself wrestling with the theme of settler-colonial relationships to nature again and again in her work. She described visiting the preserved specimens of the extinct birds in museums and archives across Atlantic Canada. In preparation for HOLD FAST, Wilson went to see a northern curlew preserved in arsenic in The Rooms’ natural history division. The preservation process has made the bird too toxic to hold with bare skin and so sensitive to light that it has to be stored in a metal box to keep it from disintegrating. For the HOLD FAST Art Crawl, Wilson created an installation titled Lost Curlew in a dimly-lit back room of Rocket Bakery. On a large screen a looped short film showed a disembodied torso and a pair of latex gloved-hands carefully lifting the preserved bird off a stainless-steel table. A smaller screen showed a black and white live-feed of the inside of the curlew’s metal box, made possible by a baby monitor set up inside the box. The baby-monitor as medium instinctually causes the viewer to brace themself for movement, in spite of the identification tag on the bird’s stiff body. Lost Curlew illuminates how a dangerous and deluded manipulation of the concept of care is translated into destruction of the natural world under settler-colonialism. 

 

While Lost Curlew asks viewers to sit with the haunting presence of extinction, Brenda Mabel Reid’s Underlay is an experiment in bringing the utopic to life, if only briefly. Reid introduced themself by explaining that their interactive, public art piece, Underlay, emerged from melding their background in architecture with their passion for quilting. As a non-binary person, for Reid the worlds of quilting and architecture often feel uncomfortably gendered – this led them to reflect on the question of what non-binary public space might look like. For the Art Crawl, Reid installed a quilt-made from fifty-three by four foot hexagonal blocks of construction grade materials in a grassy field in Bannerman Park. They offered participants a sleep mask and some ear plugs before inviting them to take a communal nap beneath the surprisingly warm, waterproof blanket.

 

The utopic impulse that animates Underlay also defines Mark Bath, Robin Peters and Matt Samms’ What are We. At the artist talks, the collaborators took the stage together to describe a project that combined electronic music, a light show, contemporary dance, and animation to create a dark and sweaty rave in the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon. The chemistry between the three presenters was infectious and the audience roared at the jokes they snuck into a talk that gave insight into the inspiration behind the project which came from animator and dancer Bath’s longing to dance with others during the early days of the Covid-19 lock down, followed by a charmingly nerdy deep dive into the technological jerry-rigging involved in creating Peters’ hypnotic light-show, and finally a description of how Samms’ life-long love of loud music led him to sampling electronic beats. During the Art Crawl, audience members were invited to stoop and scrunch themselves through a small opening in a large wooden door on Clift-Baird’s Road. Inside, Bath danced in-front of a projection of psychedelic rotoscope animations that featured drawings of his own form multiplied and dancing with the same jerky-liquid gait, Samms’ beat pulsed and Peters’ lights slid through a series different, popsicle-bright primary colours. Many of the people who passed through the portal into the secret party themselves joined Bath on the poured cement dance floor, the atmosphere of the piece making it possible to really let loose. 

To mark Eastern Edge’s fortieth anniversary, the Fancy Artist Talks wrapped up with a short documentary about the origins of HOLD FAST. The festival began as the 24 Hour Art Marathon (later abbreviated to HAM) and the film included footage of the deliciously chaotic annual event, which combined a full 24 hours of non-stop community art making with a wild party featuring live bands and sometimes a mosh pit. In recent years, the festival has become less staunchly raucous and DIY, taking a shape that more closely resembles a conventional contemporary arts festival. In the documentary artist, Kai Bryan says they believe the shift in pitch was necessary to make the festival accessible to a wider audience, even if it meant losing a little of the festival’s “spark”. In some ways, What are We felt like an homage to the wild energy of the early days of the festival, especially because it took place in the same garage as the art marathon. This year’s programming delivered a series of unique works that addressed difficult and important subject matter in unexpected ways, while also preserving flickers of HAM’s unruly joyous legacy.

Eva Crocker is a freelance editor and author. Her debut novel All I Ask won the 2020 BMO Winterset Award. Her short story collection Barreling Forwardwas shortlisted for Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQS2 Writers and the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers. It won the Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Author’s Award, and was a National Post Best Book. Her new novel Back in the Land of the Living was published by House of Anansi Press in August 2023. She is completing a PhD in the Interdisciplinary Humanities department at Concordia University, where she is studying visual art as a resistance to resource extraction.