Emerging artists win award from Hamilton studio
Six local students will have their work exhibited at Hamilton Artists Inc.
Hamilton Artist Inc.’s annual Ignition Artist Showcase, like most things, looks a little different this year.
The exhibition, which has featured emerging student artists at the local studio since 2013, is going digital for the first time this year. Ignition has showcased the work of several promising McMaster University student artists for eight years, but due to COVID-19, the studio has been forced to adapt the program.
The Ignition Award for Distinction, the winners of which are featured in the Ignition Artist Showcase, is doled out annually by Hamilton studio Hamilton Artists Inc. to promising fine arts students from local universities.
This year, six students (from McMaster and, for the first time, the University of Waterloo) won. Typically, Ignition recipients have their work exhibited at Hamilton Artist Inc.’s gallery space on James Street North, but this year they will have their work showcased digitally on the gallery’s website and receive “dedicated mentorship” from experienced artists.
The “Inc.,” as it is affectionately called, is also running window sales of each Ignition recipient’s work at their gallery and featuring conversations between them on the gallery’s Instagram page.
Abedar Kamgari, Hamilton Artists Inc.’s programming director, said she’s thrilled about the tweaks to the Ignition Award this year.
“We have six artists for the first time and this opportunity to have cross-institutional exchange and dialogue which has been really lovely,” said Kamgari. “It’s been a slightly unique year in how we offer Ignition this year, but I think it’s been just as rewarding.”
She says that artists graduating from school face unique obstacles when it comes to penetrating the local arts scene in Hamilton. Ignition is designed to ease that process.
“One of the biggest challenges to having a career as an artist, especially when you’re coming out of school, is to have connections in the community,” said Kamgari. “For us, as an artist centre, it’s really important to create some of these opportunities for emerging artists to get integrated within the Hamilton art scene, to be able to stay in the city, and also to be connected to other artists and practitioners within not just Hamilton, but the larger region.”
Hamilton Artists Inc. was founded in 1975 and has cultivated a strong reputation for showcasing experimental and diverse artists over the course of its nearly five-decades-long history. And since its inception less than a decade ago, Ignition recipients have been known to enjoy successful careers in the Hamilton and Greater Toronto Area art scenes. Ignition has provided both a launch pad and an ever-elusive form of validation that can propel young artists to personal and professional success with their art, said Kamgari.
“It’s important to us to be able to support the development of artists’ work,” she said. “Our priority is just making sure that artists have opportunities to be able to remain artists.”
The Spectator spoke with the six recipients of the 2021 Ignition Award for Distinction.
JET COGHLAN Toronto
Jet Coghlan might have the most outwardly political art of any of this year’s Ignition recipients. And that’s no surprise — they’ve been challenging the system since childhood.
Coghlan is queer, neurodivergent, and born in Mexico — three identifiers that figure hugely in a wordly outlook. Their Ignition exhibition is made up of five no-holds-barred films aimed squarely at convention. One contains audio of Coghlan speaking out against police brutality; another blends a spliced-up speech about the Land Back movement with pixelated images of trees, protest signs and brutalist buildings.
“More than being a middle finger to institutions, I want to consider my art to be didactic,” said Coghlan. “My art is not trying to point fingers at what’s moral and what’s not moral. More than anything, I just want to highlight the obvious.”
Coglan’s art is stirring and visceral — and that’s on purpose. Another film in the exhibition, titled, “The mind in relation to its own decadence,” quickly transitions from peaceful shots of water dripping to echoed, reverbed existential cries. It’s provocative yet neutral, demanding the observer look inward for answers.
“I’m just hoping that maybe along the lines you will be reflecting upon what were the emotions or thoughts that these things brought up,” said Coghlan. “So it’s a reflection — that’s what I’m hoping my art ferments.”
DAVID NGUYEN 22, Brantford
David Nguyen can trace his artistic journey back to the moment his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Nguyen’s father had a tumour “the size of an orange” in his kidney. Nguyen, just 21 at the time, watched as his father went through chemotherapy, got better, got worse and, eventually, died at the age of 53.
“It got me thinking about who I am and what makes up my identity,” said Nguyen, who is Vietnamese and a member of the LGBTQ2+ community. “I delved into researching my own cultural background, history, and language, and from there, I just kept making work in relation to my own cultural identity.”
The work Nguyen is showcasing for the Ignition exhibit is informed by that pursuit. Nguyen, a multimedia photographer and filmmaker, drew inspiration from his exploration into his identity for works like “Comfort,” where a self-portrait featuring a pair of Nguyens: one with his eyes and mouth sewn shut, the other embracing the former from behind. Nguyen describes the striking photograph as a depiction of the Asian family experience, because “a sense of comfort is maintained by the lack of confrontation.”
“Instead of confronting the issue of racial injustice within the Asian community, the eyes and the mouth are fixed shut.”
Perhaps most striking is a film featured in the exhibit called “Last Meal,” an homage to Nguyen’s deceased father. The three-minute video depicts Nguyen at one end of a dinner table eating Vietnamese food while a portrait of his father sits at the other end, staring back at Nguyen. The film is silent, but Nguyen speaks to his father, nibbling at his food in between sentences.
“It was an emotional work, yet it really gives an understanding about fatherhood and mortality,” said Nguyen. “It looks at closure as well as healing.”
BAZ KANOLD 31, Waterloo
Waterloo-based artist Baz Kanold tackles body dysphoria in inventive ways. In Kanold’s Ignition exhibit, a number of paintings are featured with different body parts — a face, a leg, a chest — scribbled out and obscured by hues of green and purple.
Kanold filters experience with gender identity and body through what is called “fragmented reality,” which “basically means a combination of reality and abstraction.” The product is a surreal depiction of what it is to have a body, and asks if we are a bunch of parts awkwardly sewn together or if we are unified and whole.
Kanold, now 31 and a fine arts student at the University of Waterloo, was working as a graphic designer before deciding to pursue visual art. “I kind of decided that wasn’t for me,” they said. “So I came back to school to do the thing I hoped to do when I was graduating high school but didn’t quite have the guts to do.”
Kanold is hoping to represent the nonbinary experience with the exposure afforded by the Ignition Award. Another work, “They/Them,” is being showcased through Hamilton Artists Inc. It’s a series of photos where the words “they” and “them” are shaved into Kanold’s hair, which is then shaved off entirely.
“Other queer people, especially people with gender identity issues, they’re my main audience,” they said. “I hope that when they see my pieces, it helps them feel like they’re not the only people going through these difficulties. But for people who don’t suffer from gender identity issues, I just hope that they get to garner some sense of the confusion and the difficulties that we see on an inward level.”
JILL LETTEN 21, Hamilton
Jill Letten grew up near Hamilton’s steel mills. The smog they produce is present in most of the paintings she’s exhibiting at The Inc. — in the sky from a smokestack, or billowing out of a burning house in the distance, or streaming from a flaming television during a news broadcast.
Her paintings are surreal — tinged in crimson, reeking of doomsday — but she says they’re grounded in her lived experience in Hamilton’s industrial neighbourhoods. Toxic waste is inescapable in her area of the city. “You can smell the burning plastic,” she said. “Even with the Hamilton harbour, as long as I can remember, it’s been too toxic to dip your feet in. If you go on the escarpment over the city, you can see the haze.”
One especially striking painting from the exhibition, a standalone piece titled “Industrial Play,” depicts several people in Hazmat suits having fun in a playground. The dark realities of the climate crisis are overwhelmingly evident in Letten’s work, and she said she wants her art to show people just how serious it is.
“I want to raise awareness, or at least create a space of reflection,” said Letten. “I see it as a form of activism, revealing things that are so ingrained in society.”
LUPITA GUERRERO 21, Kitchener
Lupita Guerrero is the child of two Nicaraguan immigrants. Her father understands firsthand the experience of being a migrant worker — an experience that permeates much of Guerrero’s work.
“He would have to start from scratch as opposed to someone else that’s already born here,” said Guerrero. “As a Canadian citizen, I was born here, and I had that privilege despite my status as a minority.”
Guerrero calls her art “multidisciplinary” — one series in her Ignition exhibition features a number of grocery store signs advertising produce and some raw truths about how our food ends up in our kitchens.
“PEACHES,” reads one sign, “Locally grown in fields by migrants who work 12 hour days, where over 70 per cent lack proper safety training. $2.87/lb.”
Another piece tackles the struggle of trying to find employment, particularly when you come from another country. Guerrero embroidered the phrase, “We’re going to consider other candidates” in black on the back of a white dress shirt — one you might wear to a job interview.
“My dad has been juggling several jobs since I can remember,” said Guerrero. “I took my dad’s experiences and all these jobs that he’s juggled, and I took his shirt, and I embroidered the back.”
She said that phrase, “we’re going to consider other candidates,” is “politically correct” but backhanded, particularly when you come from a minority background. “It’s a very generic term, but it holds so much weight when you’ve worked so hard to get there. It’ll be given to someone else, because maybe you’re not worthy of that position, based on maybe where you’re from, or the colour of your skin or the experience that you have.”
For Guerrero, microaggressions like these are pervasive for migrant workers. “A lot of these immigrants have the experience and the willpower and determination to get that job, but they’re still deprived of those opportunities that are so easily given to a Canadian citizen.”
TEBA FAISAL 21, Hamilton
Teba Faisal used her Ignition exhibition to slice through an integral part of the Western cultural canon: “Sex and the City.”
Faisal was born and raised in Iraq and came to Canada by way of the United Arab Emirates in 2013. She has fixed her artistic gaze on the atrocious and racist depictions of Arab and Muslim women throughout the history of Hollywood.
In her Ignition exhibition, she juxtaposes images of “Sex and the City”’s Carrie Bradshaw hamming it up in a niqab with scenes from the 1921 film “The Sheik,” which similarly ridicules traditional Muslim attire.
Faisal takes a multimedia approach to her work, employing .GIFs and splicedup, distorted videos of films to communicate her artistic messages. One .GIF shows a niqab-clad Bradshaw lifting the bottom of her outfit in “Sex and the City 2.” The .GIF loops just as Bradshaw’s leg is about to be exposed out of respect for the traditional aim of the niqab, which is to conceal skin out of modesty. The clip flips the original comedic aim of the scene on its head, exposing the film’s lack of respect for Arab and Muslim culture while simultaneously demonstrating how that respect should be paid.
“With Hollywood movies being one of the most accessible forms of media for us, it’s interesting that this whole system is geared toward entertaining the masses and has these agendas of representing BIPOC people in really violent ways,” said Faisal. “Taking a movie like ‘The Sheik’ shows that it’s very historical. It’s not a trend.”
She said that Hollywood’s fixation on racist stereotypes have been personally harmful as well. When she came to Canada, she was just entering high school, and she endured a number of harmful stereotypes that are perpetuated by Hollywood. She’s hoping her work can shift that narrative, in some small way.
“I’m always confident that people can unlearn false things,” said Faisal, adding that everyone needs to do the work to undo systemic racism through collaboration. “Solidarity and coming together is so important to me. This fight for justice is not one that we can do by ourselves.”