tell them from me
Emily Hayes, Ashley Hemmings, Ann Manuel, Alanna Marouney, Sabrina Pinksen
Union House Arts, June 29-August 10, 2024
Reviewed by Luke Quinton
We can’t see her eyes. The hat hangs low, a cigarette dangles and needs the ash tapped. The fish she’s filleting and the bloodied knife are frozen in mid-action.
“How to Gut a Fish,” rendered in Sabrina Pinksen’s creamy brushstrokes, gives us a view outsiders aren’t usually allowed to see, finding those moments that only a daughter would know to watch for.
Like the moment in “The Cabin,” where a mother whose thousand yard stare says I’m exhausted, I’m weary, I’ve seen all this before. I’m too smart and too old for this shit. This night at the kitchen table with a pack of smokes, a game of cards, an ashtray, a bottle of beer. All in close focus, huddled under the light. Maybe she loves the people around the table, and maybe she’s caught here — the same shit, the same chats, every Saturday night. And yet she finds herself here again and again.
Mothers in “Tell Them From Me,” (curated by Bethany MacKenzie) are sometimes trapped under huge forces, and sometimes they, or at least their artist children, wink at us knowingly, as if to say they know we know, that actually the trap is often the only thing on offer. It’s a gorgeous, intimate show with a satisfying mix of media, materials, and approaches to these fraught relationships between mothers and families, mothers and their children. Hooked rugs (Ashley Hemmings), oil paintings (Sabrina Pinksen), altered rugs (Emily Hayes), felted hands (Alana Morouney), and bronzed chicken wishbones (Ann Manuel).
Ashley Hemmings must really love their Nan, because you probably wouldn’t dedicate—I’m going to guess—weeks or months, to a life-sized hooked rug portrait, blinged with a ring of flowers and a piece of wisdom, in a jokey text with alternating colours, that reads “Distance makes the heart grow fonder. Bullshit makes the grass grow longer” (“Advice From Nan” 2021).
It’s not always clear what our mothers want from us. What can we realistically give them in return? Especially while staying true to ourselves and lives of our own?
Searching for answers can be uncomfortable and unsatisfying. Maybe it’s better not to dig too deep into the difficult questions, actually.
Ann Manuel’s bronze plaques (“Objects for a Reliquary from the Book of Days”) elude easy understanding, but viewers who search the textures and typewritten words on six miniature cast bronze plaques the size of post-it notes, have their careful attention rewarded.
Some of the words and phrases are immediately visible: Comforts, wondering, sanctuary, blockages, summer hanging in the air, moving forward, things heading south.
The viewer has to work to read and interpret the text, which is sometimes obscured or simply missing, as in:
Although I sought cor . . . rt
In being present dur . . .
Her lost years and it was
Anything but.
Ashley Hemmings, Advice From Nan, 2021
After a while the threads gather together and pieces of narrative come into focus. “ 4 July 2016. Helped set up B’s studio/space. There is the promise/ of summer hanging in the/air.” The dates cross years, until we read a note dated 2018, “… tomorrow/it will be one month since/my mother died.” We trace the events as best we can, even when the plates are literally cracked and whole sections are missing. It exists in a liminal state, a permanent recording of a narrative that almost can’t bear to reveal the events into the open air. It’s as if the words themselves have sinew and muscle, imprinted into bronze bones, even as they sit in discomfort and sadness.
Maybe it’s less about what mothers want and more about the things none of us can have.
On one of the plaques, as the writer wonders about memory, a line reads, “Mom is fading away.” It was dug and cast into a bronze that could be legible a thousand years from now.
Luke Quinton is a writer, audio producer, and host, based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. He is the host and lead producer of the 7-part Come By Chance series for CBC and Novel and has written about art and culture for The Globe and Mail, Eater, Dwell, and others. Luke has made docs for CBC, 99 Percent Invisible, Snap Judgement, and the BBC.
July 2024