IAIA Week 1 Round-up

In classic residency fashion, I spent the first week trying to put my life and inbox back together while beading a patch with unknown purpose. The welcome lunch was sweet, and only made me a little bummed that I couldn’t be there. I'm just gonna share the art folks and things I had going on:

- Caught up with artist/curator/filmmaker/sweetie Eli Hirtle while he was in town for some work. We made plans to catch Rhayne Vermette’s new film, Levers, next month at the art dork theatre

- M'guys Halluci Nation were in town! Meet up with fellow artists Cole Pauls and Kirsten Hatfield

- Jeremy Dutcher was in town for a show! I designed the poster for Jeremy's west coast tour and had the honour of being his first official merch design. Prints! T-Shirts! Totes! It was a lot! Special shout-out to Tajliya Jamal for printing on the limited edition posters!

- MISSED Marika Echachis Swan's opening for A Circle Strong Enough to Carry Both Sides, at the Burnaby Art Gallery! Because I was at Jeremy Dutcher!

- Studio visit with friend and artist Rawan Hassan about her upcoming show at grunt gallery. We selected Rawan's show from the open call and when I left I asked, sheepishly, if I could come back to curate her show.

- Also had a studio visit with Jenie Gao, about THEIR upcoming show at grunt gallery, Where Mountain Cats Live, because I'm writing the essay for the publication but also was like where the fuck is Jenie, I miss them

- TRIED to go to Taylor Baptiste's artist talk at the OR Gallery for her exhibition, Fireline Kinship, but arrived and found out it had been moved! Missed the update in the doomscrool. Bah.

- Read Lee Lai’s new graphic novel, Cannon and it ruled and one day I’ll meet her instead of messages being ferried between our mutuals lol

- Zine Harvest! Low-key, the debut of Rawan and I's new free flyers printed by Erica Wilk at Moniker Press. Snagged some zines from Jared aka Stankdaddy and Maya McKibbin to send down to Santa Fe~

- Procrastinated but not in an evil way about starting writing on the essay for my cousin Vance Wright’s show at the OR gallery opening…on a timeline I should be more respectful of

First day of my digital residency with IAIA

Firstly, extreme gratitude to the Institute of American Indian Arts for being so generous and flexible and letting me do this residency digitally even though I ache, I yearn, I so desperately wanted this to all be in person. Borders have always been sites of violence and control and while the circumstances for me are no where near the circumstances for people in precarious statuses across Turtle Island facing deportation at the hands of fascist fucks, it’s been a strange reality to hold question the safety of crossing a border for such a unique opportunity.

Did you know? That the US and CA governments have a country-to-country agreement to share criminal records with one another at the border? Any border guard can look it up. What is also included in this, even if you aren’t convicted and don’t have anything officially on your record, your police interactions still show up. While I was able to go through a process called “diversion” in the BC Courts that does not result in a criminal record, my arrest from a pro-Palestine protest in May of 2024 itself still shows up at the border as a “police interaction”. They won’t have all the details, but my digital presence is also pretty easy to decipher.

I don’t know what specifically will come of it, but it will be in the back of my mind with the many increasing reasons why crossing the border has become more fraught; between the records check and being trans while making art about…being Indigenous, trans, anti-fascist…you get the picture. That’s not even a great situation to be navigating on this side of the border. Anti-trans rhetoric and legislation is quickly taking ground up here as well, and during the last couple years of Vancouver’s current bitcoin obsessed mayor and city council, the police budget has increased by 44%! Yay!!!!

Anyways. Excited for this little chapter of my life and wish I could be there. Keep a eye out for when these AIR opportunities open up again at IAIA!