Friday Special Blend
Friday September 27th, 2024 with Susan Johnston - Micah Petti
Regatu Asefa and Stéphane Alexis on Inviting the Conflict (Ottawa Art Gallery) and a conversation with poet, filmmaker, and academic Armand Garnet Ruffo about The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow

Inviting the Conflict (Ottawa Art Gallery until 20 October 2024, in partnership with Ottawa Black Art Kollective and featuring Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman, Tolorunlogo Akinrinola, Stéphane Alexis, Jemimah Lorissaint, Judy Nakagawa, Yomi Orimoloye): Inviting the Conflict presents artistic confrontations with these darker emotional states, positioning art as a cathartic process, exploring how creative expression can navigate and potentially reconcile our pain. Featured works delve into sadness, loss, grief, insecurity, anxiety, vulnerability, and mortality, offering visual manifestations of the artists’ inner turmoil. As such, these works are emotional diaries,1 and raw expressions of hardship. Judy Nakagawa’s Words of Sadness explores three layers of grief: from moving away from a formative city, to witnessing the decline of her parents, to experiencing the devastating loss of a friend. Tolorunlogo Akinrinola’s My Mental State weaves a story that challenges stereotypes of vulnerability, particularly for Black men, emphasizing the strength and beauty found in emotional openness. Yomi Orimoloye’s Birthday Boy shares an existential melancholy that often comes with aging; am I becoming who I want to be? The layered masks reveal the complexities and performance of ‘self.’ Stéphane Alexis’s Ghost series grapples with the trauma of a near-death experience, including fear, physical pain, and relief. Creating these works forced Alexis to relive the trauma, transforming the artistic process into a path to healing. Similarly, Sara-Mecca Abdourahman’s impulsive work serves as a therapeutic outlet, navigating nostalgia, grief, and the longing for childhood innocence. In Jemimah Lorissaint’s Between Tears and Light, water expresses the artist’s sadness, physical distress, and emotional isolation, yet also cleanses and baptizes the tormented figure – renewed from sorrow. The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow (Armand Garnet Ruffo, Wolsak & Wynn, 2024): In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, award-winning author Armand Garnet Ruffo brings to life not only the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper, but also the complexities of telling Indigenous stories. From Wasauksing (Parry Island) to the trenches of WWI to the stage, Ruffo moves seamlessly through time in these poems, taking the reader on a captivating journey through Pegahmagabow’s story and onto the creation of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life. Throughout, Ruffo uses the Ojibwe concept of two-eyed seeing, which combines the strengths of western and Indigenous ways of knowing, and invites the reader to do the same, particularly through the inclusion of the Anishinaabemowin language within the collection. These are poems that challenge western conventions of thinking, that celebrate hope and that show us a new way to see the world.