Reverberations: 40 Years of MAWA’s Foundation Mentorship Program

Opening party: Friday, Sept 6, 6 - 8 pm at MAWA
Exhibition continues Wed-Fri, Sept 11 - Oct 18, 10 am - 4 pm
Nuit Blanche: Saturday, Sept 28, 8-10 pm

To mark the 40^th Anniversary of the Foundation Mentorship Program (FMP),[1] MAWA asked us—Abigail Auld (mentee ‘19) and Jenny Western (mentor ‘10, ‘19)—to curate an exhibition featuring work by past participants of MAWA’s core program since 1985. Over four decades, 400+ emerging and established artists have engaged in mentorship through this initiative. The breadth of FMP graduates is astonishing. Artwork produced by this rich, multigenerational group could yield several distinct exhibitions. Yet, tasked with conceiving of a small exhibition, we wrestled with how to approach the dynamic cohort, and with the impossibility of condensing varied experiences. Instead, rather than encapsulate the program in whole, the artwork by the eleven artists in Reverberations connects with a founding motivation of the program—to foster resilience through interpersonal exchange.

From its outset, MAWA convened around mentorship, identifying intergenerational and peer-based learning as means to effect systemic change. Forty years later, reverberations across these relational networks have fundamentally altered the surrounding art ecology. In response, we find ourselves thinking about the significance of accessing and creating support systems. How are collective resiliencies and self-actualization nurtured? What kinds of exchange, correspondence, and relationality allow divergent lifeforms to flourish and persevere?

For her series Table Making, Lisa Wood invited fellow artists to share a meal and conversation about art/life. Video documentation of these one-on-one encounters informed portraits which capture each subject mid-thought, in poses reminiscent of art historical depictions of divine inspiration. As viewers we are brought into this intimate exchange, witnessing the flicker of thought wash over subjects’ expressions and gestures, and the open vulnerability intrinsic to processing ideas together.

Like the exchanges expressed in Wood’s paintings, Jo-Anne Balcaen’s Survey for Cultural Workers / Questionnaire pour travailleurs culturels illuminates an essential force behind arts production. Balcaen poses questions about the daily challenges and motivations of cultural workers, compiling the anonymized responses of curators, coordinators, administrators, and technicians into a training manual-like publication. These testimonies recount the psychic tensions of working between artist(s) and organizational constraint—a tightrope that carries added weight for the cultural worker whose employment can both stabilize and confine their own artistic pursuits.

Though Laura Lewis’s Self-Portrait in Oscillation depicts a lone subject, the painting emerged in relation to others. Lewis explains that her turn toward self-portrait occurred after years spent painting queer artists and friends. The strength and vulnerability shown by those who posed for her inspired this turn, in part, to reciprocate the gift of allowing oneself to be seen.[2] The resulting self-portrait explores multiplicities, examining the body, vulnerability, and queerness, in relation to a community not present in the gallery but felt in the strength of self-knowledge shown here.

Francesca Carella Arfinengo explores a distant relational network through her revival of ‘dump’ roses—discarded florist’s blooms—in dyed textiles. This work led Arfinengo to trace South American-grown flowers through Miami, Florida, to shops across North America. Gifts Up the Chain developed as an offering of return. Dried roses bundled in dyed silk were sent back through the supply chain. Arfinengo’s gallery installation is possible because some parcels were rendered undeliverable by disconnected postal networks, highlighting the profound asymmetry that enables networks of extraction.

Vi Houssin’s Principle of Correspondence examines delicate balance. Small, beadwoven tokens portray insects arranged in a seemingly symmetrical specimen-like display. Up close, these pinned mosquitos, centipedes, water scorpions, and dragonfly reveal schisms. Skewed colour inversions and shifted bilateral symmetry muddle the expected conventions of mirrored binaries, instead showing beauty in glitches, balance in asymmetry. Houssin links these expressions to the Métis beadwork practice of intentionally stitching misshapen or off-colour “spirit beads” as an act of humility.

At first glance Mélanie Rocan’s Passing Through appears to be a circus tent that has collapsed. But upon closer inspection the colourful jumble of brush strokes appears to materialize and dematerialize an assortment of items before our eyes; a quilt, broken frames, the head of a hobby horse. The piece nudges us to consider the temporality of the natural world, a place we are only passing through. Here is the memory of something long past, an unstable exchange between the known and the remembered.

AO Roberts’s Say It Ain’t So meditates on loss and preservation through abstractions of technology, language, and grief. Each text portrait corresponds with a person in Roberts’s life who has passed. Blackened surfaces reference a phonautograph—a 19th-century device that turned sound into visual record, scratching soundwaves into lampblack-coated paper. Pastel text silkscreened over soot surface imprint words from a glossary created by 12th-century nun.[3] Reaching across time, these portraits layered extinct language and silent recordings in communion with those no longer here.

Leslie Supnet’s video Sing to Me the Song was created in 2020 as a reflection of how the grief and stress of isolation brought forth a newfound vividness to her dreams. Home movies in conjunction with found footage of families visiting the Philippines stand in as metaphor for Supnet’s soaring dreamscapes. The subjects of her video appear so full of joy, there is a comfort here that transcends the subconscious state in a time of deep uncertainty.

Sarah Crawley’s body of work at the water's edge reflects on the grief she experienced at her mother’s passing. Crawley lay along the shoreline of a lake to capture the 45-minute exposure of the images seen through her hand-built pinhole camera’s aperture. This required her to stretch across land and often freezing water, contemplating not only the loss of her mother but the liminal space upon which her vulnerable body rested. The resulting piece reflects a state of fragility.

Lita Fontaine has acted as a cultural leader and mentor in various capacities in Winnipeg’s Indigenous art scene and beyond for several years, including her role as a MAWA mentor in 2009. Her work often uses bold colours alongside symbols such as the dress, the tipi, and the medicine wheel to explore powerful feminine energy, one that speaks of the important role of the individual and the community.

Aganetha Dyck has the honour of being one of MAWA’s very first mentors and the distinction of having participated as a mentor on five separate occasions over the years. As a cultural worker juggling many hats, one of her earlier works spoke to domestic labour by creating sculptural pieces out of canned buttons. The juxtaposition of these two materials is arresting and the piece is made even more delightful by the fact that Dyck’s canned buttons are now, much like MAWA’s FMP, entering their fourth decade of existence.

While the artwork in Reverberations coalesce around themes of interrelation, the artists themselves bear interconnections that stretch across and beyond the group. Aganetha Dyck mentored Reva Stone who mentored Jo-Anne Balcaen among thirteen others linked by this chain. There are mentorship pairings between us, Lisa Wood + Laura Lewis, AO Roberts + Francesca Carella Arfinengo. Sarah Crawley, Lisa Wood, AO Roberts, and Leslie Supnet are among the many who both received and provided mentorship. Vi Houssin’s beadwork insects originated as a response to an exhibition by another former mentee, Monique Fillion,[4] while Lisa Wood’s portraits feature AO Roberts and former mentee Jessie Jannuska. These intersections demonstrate the myriad of ways that mentorship initiates reverberations. And, from one participant to another, with artists standing alongside, next to, in front of, and behind one another, the ripple effects continue.

[1] Originally called Foundation Advisory Program

[2] Lewis, Laura, “Artist Talk with Laura Lewis” (lecture, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston, Ontario, July 10, 2024). Online.

[3] 12th-Century abbess and composer Saint Hildegard of Bingen created Lingua Ignota (unknown language).

[4] Fillon, Monique, “Embedded” (exhibition, Martha Street Studio, Winnipeg, Manitoba, June 9 – July 14, 2023). https://www.printmakers.mb.ca/...