Don’t Miss: Gestures Of Remembering

Emma Nishimura, Shikata ga nai: Nothing can be done about it, 2024. Photo etching on gampi with thread, framed in natural wood (19 inches  x 33.75 inches). Varied edition of 2.

United Contemporary’s relocated space on Tecumseth Street, which opened last month, is a sight to behold. Spacious yet inviting – in part thanks to the vibrantly varied rotational selection of works on view at the back half of the gallery, it was met with a warm welcome also due to its exceptional inaugural exhibition, Gestures of Remembering.

This duo show between the multi-media artists Emma Nishimura and Linda Sormin is a feast of textures and a tender conceptual intertwinement of themes. Nishimura presents a somber, heart-wrenching range of cut-and-sewn paper and photo etching works. Some of the pieces are singles or groups of diminutive dresses and other garments that have been painstakingly threaded to take on sculptural sartorial silhouettes.

Their inspiration is derived from photos Nishimura had seen of her grandmother that were taken in a Japanese internment camp here in Canada during the Second World War. She was also creatively piqued by a box full of clothing patterns and miniscule 3-D garment mock-ups her grandmother had created and used while taking a drafting class in the 1940s. Nishimura found them four years after her grandmother’s death – a revelatory moment given the artist’s oeuvre has long included the themes of generational trauma, grief, tenacity, bonds and resilience. In this show, the richness of tactility and depth of emotional gravity explored highlights Nishimura’s current navigation of these topics while visually contemplating the communal narratives she has come to hear while eliciting information about her family’s past. Kindred conversations are transcribed almost inscrutably in a selection of pieces within the show, connecting Nishimura’s history with her present and future in a most compelling fashion.

Where Nishimura’s works poetically whisper their generative stories, Sormin’s vivid and frenetic pieces shout in perfect counterbalance. Her contributions to the show include an assortment of ceramics tangled together with found, purchased and created objects representing ideas of colonialism, displacement and identity, such as in the case of a 3-D printed formation of the artist’s face affixed to the monumental work Origin Myths.

Sormin’s complexly hewn works have an accidental, intangible influence from her Batak Indonesian background, tethering her to Indigenous predecessors through her creation of lengthy sculptures resembling the types of “notebooks” used by Batak Shamans. Similarly to Nishimura, Sormin has scrawled words on these works, also adding illustrations of personal and ancestral symbols. There’s a pleasing tension tying ancient and contemporary personhoods in this trove of energetic works, imbuing them with the sense that Sormin is documenting and ideating in tandem while developing an even more attuned sense of self.

United Contemporary is preparing to host an Instagram Live at 11am EST on Sunday, September 22nd with Nishimura and Sormin that will feature a virtual tour of the show and an interview with the pair from their respective studios. And below, the artists discuss how their practices have unified in such an elegant and expansive way in this exhibition.

Linda Sormin, Siak (spicy), 2024. Glazed ceramic, hand-cut paper, resin (5.75 inches x 6.5 inches x 5 inches).

What prompted you two to do this show?

Emma: Mel [Trojkovic, Gallery Director at United Contemporary] did some matchmaking for us through knowing our practices and interests and histories. How it all comes together is quite magical, and it's been exciting getting to know Linda's work better. There are many overlaps with mine.

Tell me about those overlaps.

Emma: For the last 15 years, my family’s history has been an influential theme in my practice. In some ways, the work in this show is about returning to what began, or initiated for me, my interest in specifically exploring the story of my grandparents, who are Japanese Canadian. Years ago, I found a box of patterns that my grandmother used; she was a seamstress and made garments for other people when she was interned in Canada during the Second World War. In this exhibition, I’m ‘returning’ to that box for inspiration, because throughout making my work, I return to stories in a way that’s not circular, but more so like it loops back. It’s like I’m touching base with them to try and fully understand them.

Linda, tell me about your work in the show.

Linda: First, I’m really excited to see our work together! Our work has actually met before we have in person [laughs].

A few years ago, I started making long drawings and paintings – like on a watercolor roll of paper that’s 25 feet long. I would draw or write something on one side and then I’d flip it over and write and draw on the other side. This was without knowing that part of my Batak Indonesian heritage is the Shamans’ use of long format books – the longest one being 17 meters – that were folded like accordions and written and drawn in on both sides; Shamans used them as notebooks. As I said, I didn't know that while I was doing this work, and it’s interesting that I had the idea that, oh, I'm going to try to innovate something in my practice but it's actually reaching back into my cultural timeline and is part of a continuum of practice.

The movement of drawing and writing and cutting through the paper– these are physical gestures of remembering that not only show thoughts and ideas through images and text, but also prompt some kind of bodily connection with the past in a way that goes beyond the verbal, beyond language.

Emma Nishimura, Federick Avenue, 2024. Photo etching on gampi with thread, framed in natural wood (14 inches x 17 inches). Varied edition of 3.

What else can people visiting the gallery expect in terms of the new work in this show?

Emma: I’ll dovetail off what Linda was saying and tie it in with the show’s title. Almost all the pieces in my part of the exhibition are small, constructed dresses. To make them, I used my grandmother's sewing patterns from a drafting course she took in 1941. I learned how to read them, and then recreated them. She crafted little paper mock-ups of what garments she made to understand how to scale them larger, and I created my own garments in response to that tiny scale with the same material – paper. So, I’ve been thinking about gestures of memory and gestures of remembering. I can't ever see the clothes that my grandmother made or talk to her about them. But every time I make a garment, I'm sewing the same pattern that she did. This act of retracing, and these gestures of memorialization, are ways to connect with her.

I have also printed photo etchings onto very thin Japanese paper, and then cut the patterns out of that and then sewed all these pieces together. One of the works, which is comprised of ten dresses, shows a photo taken from within one of the internment camps; there was no running water, no electricity, but all the women have their hair perfectly done and are wearing these lovely 1940s outfits. It speaks to the necessity in putting on a brave face and carrying on.  

I printed this image it in shades of grey, and there’s the same dress featuring this image over and over. Here, I’m revisiting the image in different ways – but what does a viewer see differently? How do other Japanese-Canadians connect with their histories? How do other people who have experienced being displaced connect with their histories?

What about you, Linda?

I didn’t know, and Mel didn’t know either, that both Emma and I were recording the voices of our family members during conversations with them – it's been part of both of our processes. And this opening up of family history within intimate settings, like talking around a dinner table, has been a big part of the way that I've been connecting more deeply with the work in a personal way.

My work in the show is inspired by pustaha, the Sanskrit word for book. My great-great-grandfather, who was a Batak Shaman, would have used these books in his spiritual practice. But even my Indonesian family who speak the Batak language didn’t know that a Batak written language existed – until I had shared what I’d learned with them – because of the European missionizing project and colonial violence, and their subsequent hoarding of these books. Even though most colonizers couldn't speak the languages, they would collect hundreds of these manuscripts and take them back to Europe. Museums are full of them, but very few of them remain in Indonesia.

I started going to museums and The British Library and connecting with these texts; I was so shocked to find that these kind of documents existed. And since then, I've been learning to write the language, although I can’t speak it verbally yet.

I started making these pieces last summer in the Netherlands; I was privileged enough to be there to do research, and to have this access to museum archives because of my academic job. I’m very aware that many of my colleagues in Indonesia are currently unable to access these documents, and several of them are involved in efforts to bring about the rematriation of Batak books.

My ceramic books and pages in this exhibition were all made before I learned to actually write the Batak language. I experienced a concussion last Fall, and it slowed me down long enough to study language. Here’s another kind of gesture of remembering, through my efforts to reclaim the knowledge that's been stolen and the written language that is obviously quickly disappearing; even the knowledge that there is a written Batak language.

Linda Sormin, Sarita, 2023-2024. Glazed ceramic, paper and found shards, including porcelain antler by Rebekah Myers and Tim Berg, metallic pigment powder, epoxy, resin (8.25 inches x 25 inches x 8 inches).

Let’s talk about the process of putting the show together in terms of how you two were working, because Linda, as you said, you'd already been working on some pieces.

Linda: I was heartened and strengthened by knowing that there was a kindred spirit in Emma, and it was exciting to talk her; it gave us a sense of community. We came up with the title for the show together, with support from my friend Gord Thompson, and the language became a placeholder for the activity. It's a kinetic title, and reflects that we’ve both been involved in hand-making in very intensive ways.

Emma: The shared experience of unearthing, unpacking, researching, and putting all of the different threads in our work together, so to speak – there was a joy in listening to and watching as somebody else explored similar but very different spaces and worlds.

Since memory and narrative are such huge parts of both of your practices, I'm curious about how you slow your mind down when you're spending time with your family members in order to really reflect on it as part of your artistic practice? Tell me about how you manage that personal collaborative element, especially in discussing such difficult topics; do you have distinct times when you sit with someone to hear their story, or is it less formalized?

Linda: I've been fortunate enough to have had family members reach out during the pandemic and beyond, and I’ve met up with some of them both in Ontario and on the West Coast. Since I’m collecting sound as part of part of my process, I have asked for their permission to record our conversations. They were very open to that, I'm so humbled by their openness. Many families have intergenerational trauma, and it’s something that kept us apart and silent for much of my life. It’s only recent that we've been welcoming each other into this space to become closer, and I'm so grateful for that.

Emma: Having intention helps. There are family members who aren't here anymore, and I regret that we hadn't recorded their stories. Now, there is a different intention in me wanting to capture oral histories in different ways.

Whenever I'm recording these oral histories, everyone has to be in agreement about the recording, and I have to make sure that the environment feels comfortable – that it still feels like a conversation. I've done lots of different interviews with people from the Japanese-Canadian community, and I’m always trying to get a sense of how comfortable people are with sharing their world with their words, and in what capacity. How much does someone want made public, and how much is just to be shared in our space in that moment.

Some of my interviews have involved sitting down photo albums and flipping through them to use them as prompts to start a story; and others have been getting groups of people together, because then all of a sudden, different people can ask each other different questions. They’ll think of questions that I wouldn't think of, or they'll ask each other questions that I wouldn't feel like I had permission to ask.

I think you’re going to inspire a lot of start doing this kind of story gathering in their own lives. Is that something you think about when a show is up?

Emma: Absolutely. It’s very much about prompting people to do their own reflecting and their own connecting, and there’s a discovery of whatever path that takes people on. It’s exciting have these deep conversations. And I think that's the fun of making art – the interpretation is wide open, and we get to see what people take away from it.

Linda: As Emma said, inviting questions and diverse voices into the conversations has been really illuminating, because you get to hear and learn from different versions of family stories when my cousins are sitting side by side and telling a story the way they recall our grandmother telling it. Sometimes we get to hear two or three versions of an event, because memory does such strange things.

Gestures of Remembering is on until Saturday, September 28th at United Contemporary.