Critical Fictions

By Hannah Godfrey

In her bold departure from conventional art criticism, Hannah Godfrey looks to the work of five contemporary queer visual artists, with attention to, and affection for, the wit, subversion, and many complexities of each of their practices. Shifting through written forms as experiential coves, Critical Fictions is a collection of inventive responses that are delicately linked, and devoted to their subjects. Alongside the five artists—Derek Dunlop, Kristin Nelson, Hagere Selam shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, Andrea Oliver Roberts, and Logan MacDonald—Godfrey shares a keen interest in intricacies of queer power, the body, and abstraction. Her varied approach to criticism embraces stories, poetry, essays, and other textual formations as means of wayfaring through the work of art. In these pages the reader will find not only celebrations of the depth, beauty, and acuity of the artworks discussed, but explorations of the imaginative thoroughfares they open up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arbeiter Ring Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781927886694

Hannah Godfrey

Hannah Godfrey (a.k.a. hannah_g) is a writer, artist, and curator living in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory.

Book preview

Cover: Critical Fictions by Hannah Godfrey

critical fictions

Hannah Godfrey (hannah_g)

ARP Books | Winnipeg

Copyright © 2023 Hannah Godfrey (hannah_g)

ARP Books (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)

205-70 Arthur Street

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Treaty 1 Territory and Historic Métis Nation Homeland

Canada R3B 1G7

arpbooks.org

Cover design concept by Hannah Godfrey/hannah_g

Cover artwork and design by Relish New Brand Experience.

Interior layout by Relish New Brand Experience.

Printed and bound in Canada by Imprimerie Gauvin.

Copyright Notice

This book is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty. 

Funder LOgos: Canada Council, Manitoba Arts Council, Government of Canada, Manitoba

ARP Books acknowledges the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program of Manitoba Culture, Heritage, and Tourism.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Critical fictions / Hannah Godfrey.

Names: Godfrey, Hannah, author.

Description: Essays, stories, and poems. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220471738 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220471924 |

ISBN 9781927886687 (softcover) | ISBN 9781927886694 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PS8613.O334 C75 2022 | DDC C818/.6—dc23

For Marisa Jane Godfrey.

—you know where i carry it—

Acknowledgements

In my experience, it takes generosity from many people to make a book happen.

All of the artists in this book shared their artwork, influences, ideas, and resources without hesitation. Each spent time reading their essay and then furnished me with important insights and adjustments. In addition, each proffered things I consider sacred, such as texts, music, influences, and personal stories that have shaped them and their work. I thank them for their time, for entrusting these things to me, and for welcoming the adventure I went on with their work.

I have a friend who is not only generous but brilliant. Courtney R. Thompson offered criticism and insights that were invaluable. I will be forever grateful for this and our regular work dates when we slogged away at our respective projects in various cafes and bars across Winnipeg.

Talking of bars, there is one in particular that was a welcome harbour for me during my research and writing. The Good Will patio became my second studio for a while, with the lovely Kelly and Laura providing me with sustaining Tings, Standard Lagers, and conversation. The occasional hallo with the lovely Tyler also replenished my stamina. I am grateful for being able to take up residence in this easeful place for a short while.

Several people offered to read various essays and texts along the way. It is easy to offer to read something, but the actual time it takes to not only thoughtfully engage but provide feedback and edits as well—well, that’s a lot. Thank you, Beth Schellenberg, Jayme Spinks, Ali King, Blair Fornwald, CT, and Boss Ross.

I was awarded funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and Manitoba Arts Council to write this book. Arts councils are incredible institutions. I am very fortunate to have benefitted from the labour of the people who work at these institutions as well as the artists who served on their grant awards juries. Thank you. And thank you to my luminous friend, Sharon Alward, who gave me an extra push to apply for funding, and who continues to counsel me wisely, irreverently, and lovingly.

The 2018 Board of Directors of aceartinc. accepted my request for a year’s leave from my job as Director of this artist-run centre in order to write this book, and I will always be grateful to them for this. Serving with this board (and a great many of their predecessors) was a privilege. They gave me solid support, not only as an employee, but as a peer. They embodied the spirit of artist-runs. A special thank you to Seth Woodyard, the then President, and Madeline Rae, the then Secretary. I would also like to thank Chantel Mierau, my co-worker, for her support at that time.

There are lots of things that need verification or provide threads in this kind of project. Thank you Doreen Girard, Erika MacPherson, Cam Forbes, Jamie Wright, Willow Rector, and Helga Jakobson—you were all so enthusiastic and helpful. Thank you, Ashley Au, who sat for ages while I played and paused sounds and music for which they provided the correct descriptions (That’s a soprano) without judgement. Thank you Roewan Crowe and Beff for loaning me your books, and Kelly Anne Butler for sending me your film.

Thank you, Neil Parkinson, the Archives & Collections Manager at the Royal College of Art, London, who kindly gave me access to the Colour Library. Thank you, Justin Muir of Malaspina Printmakers for touring me around Derek Dunlop’s exhibition at your gallery.

Thank you to Maxine Proctor and Lauren Lavery, editors of BlackFlash and Peripheral Review respectively, and also to your proofreaders. Your enthusiasm for the essays you published buoys me to this day. I felt very cared for and supported by you both. Writers are lucky that there are editors such as you to work with.

Colin Smith was the editor of the manuscript, and his no nonsense style (This sentence is too gassy) and easy recourse to a barked laugh and acerbic observation was a delight. More than once he did the pulling up by my bootstraps I needed. Colin—from the bottom of my barrel, thank you.

I am very grateful to the terrific and dedicated team at ARP, especially Todd Besant and Irene Bindi, who supported this project from the beginning. The inimitable Irene edited and elevated the manuscript with her brilliant, candid suggestions—thank you. Thank you Terry Corrigan for his patience and openness when typesetting this unconventional text.

Thank you to the wonderful Beff, Burbs, Hawky, and Azzy—your company and encouragement gave me good cheer and hearty psychic vivers.

And a deep thank you to my family—Mum, Marisa, Will, Tansy, Barney, and Dad, for a foundation of love and profane cheerleading.

I wrote this book in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory, the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Métis Nation. With soft steps, I hope for it to join the sphere of knowledge and stories that have been shared here for millennia past, present, and future.

The essay for Hagere Selam shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot was previously published by BlackFlash magazine, digital and print, 2020.

The essay for Derek Dunlop was previously published by Peripheral Review, digital and print, 2020. The text Found object (fur stretcher, elastic bands) was published by Peripheral Review in their print edition, 2020.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Derek Dunlop

Colour, Abstraction, and Queerness in the Work of Derek Dunlop

Fictions

Kristin Nelson

The Banality of Commodity: Aesthetics and Labour in the Work of Kristin Nelson

Fictions

Hagere Selam shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot

Spectres of Loss: Diaspora and Yearning in the Work of Hagere Selam shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot

Fictions

Andrea Oliver Roberts

Words in Whose Mouth: Incantation, Unbelieving, and Anti-Capitalism in the Work of Andrea Oliver Roberts

Fictions

Logan MacDonald

With/held: Queer Strategies of Sharing in the Work of Logan MacDonald

Fictions

Artists’ Websites

References

Introduction

I once had the good fortune to listen to a Welshman talk about the ploughmen of his land. He described how, for hundreds of years, they sang to their oxen, how singing was inseparable from their ploughing. Although he only spoke for ten or twenty minutes, those ploughshares and beasts, the earth they turned and the furrows they formed, the voices that sang of history and love, have roamed around my thoughts for years. There is much pleasure to be had, and much curiosity to be born, in passing purposefully back and forth over a modest patch. The ploughing is shaped by the song and the song is shaped by the ploughing.



Derek Dunlop, Kristin Nelson, Hagere Selam shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, Andrea Oliver Roberts, and Logan MacDonald. These artists engender a kind of yearning in me that consists of dislocation, recognition, compulsion, and inquisitiveness. Over the years, I have sought to spend time with their respective works, to fill my mind entirely with them and then the associations they conjure, which are as beholden to those artists as the patterns of iron filings are to a magnet. Their works are among my lodestones. Although quite distinct, there are threads and sympathies between them: all are Canadian, each works with abstraction, the body is central, they probe structures of power and control with wit and pathos, and each is queer. Their subversion, humour, slipperiness, and fluidity are rooted in their queerness, making them intimate bedfellows. ¹ Their work is brilliantly critical, tenderly gorgeous, and delightfully acerbic, and I wanted to share the profound enjoyment and provocation to be had in their art; the banquet they lay for the brain, spirit, and senses. However, many of my responses to such work didn’t fit in an essay form: memories, images, poems, stories, and weird tangents. These interdisciplinary texts, mostly placed after each essay, respond to the analysis, the art, and the experience of writing with these artists’ work—they are the songs that accompanied the ploughing.

1I will take this footnote as an opportunity to mention the footnotes to follow. Hannah Arendt first revealed to me how enjoyable these small-fonted lines could be. I use them as places for thinking in parallel, remembering, and occasionally sharing the experiences I was having at that moment of writing. In addition, of course, to the honourable practice of citing sources.

Derek

Dunlop

The Rooms

I want you to picture_______

Hold the image. You don’t need to tell me what it is.

Walk over the bridge, go up the step, put your hand on the handle. Turn it.

You are in a room. There’s furniture, a window. What colour is the room?

It’s _______

Where is the picture?

The wall that has the window in it.

How big is it?

My size.

What do you feel as you look at it?

Uh. Recognised.

Go on.

I recognise the picture not because I’ve seen it before. It’s like there are faces—no, not faces, it’s the stuff after a face has disappeared, not someone dead. Before they’re dead, the stains before they die. No, god, that’s not it. It’s like things I’ve lost but didn’t know I had ’til now—my mother’s watch, keys, rivers. I’m not seeing those things but

Turn from this picture and look for a doorway or a way to leave the room.

OK.

Where are you?

Another room.

Find another picture.

OK.

Can you see it?

Yes.

What do you see?

Uh_______

Colour, Abstraction,

and Queerness in the

Work of Derek Dunlop

and speak in vain to the silent ash

—Catullus, 101, trans. E. Cederstrom

and talk (why?) with mute ash

—Catullus, 101, trans. Anne Carson

I was boarding a train from London St. Pancras International to Paris Gare du Nord. At the end of the platform, on the wall of the station above the clock, was a line of handwriting in pink neon. ²

I Want My Time With You.

I was on my way to see my beloved Parisian lawyer and his husband for the first time in years. Gazing at these words, I thought of time and space, of traversing distance in order to place my body in proximity to one I love and had not been near for many years, but with whom I once spent an important year. I thought of the colour—shocking pink—and how pink is one of Derek Dunlop’s favourites. The pink is mounted in front of old red bricks, the sturdy Victorian bones of this station, and it is shocking to see it there above the sensible old clock, but the shock is pleasurable, much as being emotionally open and unruly in public is. It was within this eddy that the interplay of colour, abstraction, and queerness in Dunlop’s work began to take root in me.

Dunlop’s engagement with abstraction has been a central tenet of his practice. He has been continually preoccupied with claiming a tradition of queer abstraction which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, seeing it as a means for artists to negotiate complicated subjectivity through coded expression. ³ The latter sentence could also act as a summation of the history of nonheteronormativity. The notion of claiming a tradition indicates Dunlop’s ability to make complex manoeuvres in his work. Tradition can be imbued with irony as well as authority—

it implies a parallel lineage of defiance and antagonism, of something that has pushed against it. Tradition also denotes a lineage of presence, and so points to another important note of queerness in Dunlop’s work, that of ancestry. There is a desire to follow a non-straight line into the past and find one’s ancestry as a queer person and as a queer artist. But, as always with anything queer, there is a curve—one should not assume straight chronology, or that the person identified as kin would wish to be so, or that these lines are fixed once they’re discovered and communicated.

Figures that refuse to be redeemed disrupt not only the progress narrative of queer history but also our sense of queer identity in the present. ⁴

During a conversation in Toronto, I asked Dunlop how he would like people to encounter his work. Over the previous hours our talk had ranged over familiar and unfamiliar terrain in a kind of wayfaring (a concept I will return to later). He talked of cruising art in exhibitions. The act of looking that is required by cruising situates the person who is doing the looking as a body open to and seeking particular experiences. The gaze has intention: it is evaluative and holds the desire for exchange and gratification; it carries expectation, even simply that of rejection. It requires a familiarity with at least rudimentary codes in order to effectively engage. The gazer is in a heightened state, alert to subtle and not so subtle signals. Situating one’s body in proximity with others (be they humans, artworks, or places designated for certain activities) is a hallmark of cruising and wayfaring, as is discovery, affirmation, and a strong sense of occupying time and space in unconventional ways. Cruising and wayfaring are means of being open to experience, laying the trail as one goes, as roots do; both are ways of being in the world, not necessarily of it, and both involve ephemeral lines of movement. ⁵

I’m reminded of my first studio visit in Winnipeg with Dunlop in 2012. He took me through a few bodies of work including Television, wallpaper variations, Palms, and the palace, the cake, camouflage and curtains. The palm paintings made a particular impression on me. Painted from stills taken from television footage of the Iraq War from 2003–2011, Dunlop depicts distorted palm trees over and over. The repetition has a complicated effect: it subtly asserts the volume of sites destroyed by US and UK missile attacks while undermining the association of these trees with oases and rest: there are no safe havens in war. Palms also symbolise the West’s troubling relationship with otherness—often exoticising, exploitative, and extractive. Dunlop’s images imply historical narratives of representation, such as botanical drawings and their relationship to classification, colonising land, exploration and trade, and the fetishisation of foreign lands. Palm leaves and trees are also laden with classical symbolism from many cultures. In both ancient Greece and Rome, palm leaves signified victory and this was absorbed into Christianity, signifying there the success of spirit over flesh, and giving the name to one of the faith’s important moveable feasts, Palm Sunday. In Islam palms can also represent peace, since victory also denotes the end of a conflict. For ancient Egyptians, it signified long life and was used in some funerary rites, and in Mesopotamian religions it was used as a symbol of fertility. Dunlop’s work is tugged on by these associations and the complex history of the relations between Europe (and later, North America) and the Middle East that include and precede the Christian Crusades.

Dunlop’s paintings of filtered, digital images of palm trees are taken from footage recorded by drones and other aircraft undertaking military strikes, which was then given to the media for broadcast by news programs. This locates us within but paradoxically farther away from the conflict, since so many filters have been placed on the images (and therefore the story) before we see them. The partialness (incompleteness) of Dunlop’s depictions speaks to the partialness (bias) of information and its dissemination.

Dunlop’s gestures, the smears made by his fingers and the movement of his body, overlay black pixelly palms and imply bodies that we do not see, neither in these works, nor in the televised footage they were sourced from. Dunlop is portraying—in fact he is enacting—effacement, a theme that recurs in his work and which his skill with abstraction and colour imbues with a profoundly productive troubling of what is and is not seen.

It was during our second studio visit in Winnipeg a year or two later that I saw Fear of Invisibility (Erased oval on the back of Annie’s Drawings), 1915/2014 (2014, graphite on found paper, 14 1/8 x 30 ¼). ⁶ On the backs of three artworks by his Great, Great Aunt Annie Rose Collie were build-ups of graphite from the drawings moving against one another in her portfolio. ⁷ Dunlop rubbed away a light, large oval shape the size of a face (the title of this piece points to its double irony). It was an act with several overtones. Primarily perhaps one of contact with the only other artist he knows of in his family and also a distant family member he believes was queer: two characteristics that dominate her memory for him. By working on the backs of these pieces, Dunlop ensured he did not further her effacement by altering her modest artistic record. He is tentatively tapping an unknown relative on the shoulder in an unknown place, hoping she will turn