Featured Image: Still From Thirza Cuthand’s Colonization: The Second Coming.
September 12 – October 27, 2018
InterAccess, 950 Dupont Street, Toronto
Curated by Lindsay Nixon
“Maybe they’re in their bedrooms figuring out how to work a dental dam.”
— Thirza Cuthand, Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory
Thirza Cuthand’s early videos were before their time, driven by her self-branded persona, unabashed attention-seeking performative dialogues, and overexposure before post-reality states were in effect. Cuthand made camcorder videos about the isolation of living in Saskatoon as an NDN lesbian in the late 1990s. The accessibility and affordability of video allowed her to create in her bedroom, cut-off but reaching out for queer connection.
In the DIY style of the time, feminist activist Kathleen Hanna wrote, performed, and produced her 1997 record Julie Ruin on a Drumatix she bought at a pawn shop for $40, in order to “escape what had happened to her.” Hanna describes cutting and pasting samples for Julie Ruin in the 2013 documentary The Punk Singer, by herself, in her room, facilitating relationships with the materials she used unmediated by anyone else. “It sounds like you can hear a human being’s fingers all over it. It sounds like bedroom culture. It sounds like something a girl made in her bedroom.”
Cuthand’s early videos suggest a similar relationship to materials—videos shot on a camcorder and carefully labored over by a “baby dyke” in her bedroom, who didn’t just then throw her work away, but chose to share it with the world. This exhibition asks, how can we connect all the bedrooms wherein NDN weirdos are creating work that is never shared? In curating this exhibition it became important to identify a gender-neutral term for girlhood, to make space for all the ways NDN loner culture is embodied by girls and gender weirdos alike. As Kite said to me in conceptualizing a gender-neutral term for girlhood, that’s “loner culture.” In “Loner Culture,” Cuthand, Fallon Simard, and Kite fill a shared bedroom with big feels and their loner creations.
More information can be found here.
Full “Loner Culture” Exhibition Text
After watching the 2013 documentary The Punk Singer, I was obsessed with what Kathleen Hanna described as “bedroom culture.” In the DIY style of the time, feminist activist Hanna wrote, performed, and produced her 1997 record Julie Ruin on a Drumatix she bought at a pawn shop for $40, in order to “escape what had happened to her.” Hanna describes cutting and pasting samples for Julie Ruin, by herself, in her room, facilitating relationships with the materials she used unmediated by anyone else. “It sounds like you can hear a human being’s fingers all over it. It sounds like bedroom culture. It sounds like something a girl made in her bedroom.”
In curating Loner Culture, it became important to
identify a gender-neutral term for girlhood, to make space for all the ways NDN
loner culture is embodied by girls and gender weirdos alike. The origin of the
term NDN is elusive. It’s been kicking around in kookum’s favorite pop culture
such as Keith Secola’s NDN Kars—so,
for a minute. But NDN reached a state of terminal velocity on the internet,
where it has become a frequent shorthand for Indigenous on platforms like
Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. In my search for a genderneutral way to
describe the things that NDN youth created in their bedrooms, and how those
creations were influenced by the onset of the internet, artist Kite said to me,
that’s loner culture.
Thirza Cuthand’s early
videos suggest a similar relationship to materials—videos shot on a camcorder
and carefully labored over by a “baby dyke” in her bedroom, who didn’t just then throw her work away, but chose to share it with the
world. Cuthand’s early videos were before their time, driven by her
self-branded persona, unabashed attention-seeking performative dialogues, and
overexposure before post-reality states and digital worlds were fully in
effect. The accessibility and affordability of video allowed Cuthand to create
in her bedroom, cut-off but reaching out for queer connection, imaging
alternative futures from within spatialities where lesbian Indigenous futures
were not ensured—stifled, even.
Cuthand’s early monologues
feel similar to a perzine—a zine about the personal experiences of its
author—dealing with topics ranging from the isolation of living in Saskatoon as
an NDN lesbian in the late 1990s, to the perils of being a young lesbian dating
in a community of women older than you. Cuthand has never been afraid to break
the barriers of identity politics with her radical intersectionality,
addressing topics of power differentiation and intimate partner violence at a
time when single issue politics reigned in lesbian and Indigenous art alike.
Almost twenty years later,
Kite now considers the confluence of youth culture and indigeneity with her
installation Better off Alone (2018).
Kite represents the uneasy truth that, for some Indigenous youth, the first
representations they saw of Indigenous women, of Indigenous peoples, in popular
culture were in Disney’s Pocahontas. Disney’s
Pocahontas is a complex figure for Indigenous youth. You have to give it to P:
she’s pretty badass, always going against her father, famously wondering, what’s waiting just around the riverbend.
Her best friend is a racoon, she has dream visions, and she gets down with her
kookum. Disney’s Pocahontas was an early model of Indigenous feminisms for all
the NDN kids out there, before age and experienced oppression complicated her
representation, because it was Pocahontas’s relationship building, not the
warriors, who would end the war between the settlers and her people.
But Pocahontas was also a
frequent commodification of the late 1990s. Her image sold pencils, cups, and
even girl’s dresses cut and sewn to look like Indigenous clothing made of hide.
Because Pocahontas was an idea, and a sexualized one to boot, she was an object
upon which John Smith could project his ~nice guy~ ego, his adventure-seeking,
kinder gentler brand of colonialism that set him apart from men like Governor
Ratcliffe. Smith first laid eyes on Pocahontas when she was running around the
forest in a skimpy hide dress that hugged her hourglass shape. He drew a gun on
her but was ultimately softened by her full lips, and her hair as it caressed
her face, blowing wildly and sensually in the wind. Somehow, despite the gun,
despite the undertone of sexual violence that marrs their entire meeting, we,
the audience, are supposed to believe both are swooned. Pocahontas’s savagery,
as the would-be colonists put it, is how those dangerous white men, as Powhatan
put, saw her. The same fascination with the savagery of Indigenous peoples
leads to another kind of nostalgic child’s play centred around voyeuristic
representations of Indigenous peoples such as culture camps for kids that
appropriate language and visualities from indigenous communities.
But with Better off Alone, Kite juxtaposes
Pocahontas’s image with underground rave culture, exhibiting kandi—brightly colored jewelry made of
plastic—from
her own loner youth, and even one that spells out “pokahontas”in lettered beads. Who is pokahontas,
the club kid persona and raver? We know she teaches John Smith about the
colours of the wind, getting him all high and shit, talking to rocks and trees,
flying through the air with holographic deer while her body feels like paint
strokes that fade in and out of the wind’s current. What a trip—and pokahontas is
the trip guide. Her visions expose that humans are all connected to one another
in a circle, a hoop, that never ends—that otter are kin. She blows minds.
Like raver culture, and
youth scenes generally, the internet was, and is, used as a means of digital
connection. At the onset of the internet, early message boards and chat rooms
created digital networks for NDN youth such as Kite and kandi kid pokahontas.
In the place of voyeuristic fascination with Indigenous savagery that can
motivate settler child’s play, Kite finds joy in the creation of computer
programs that make computer’s bark, for instance. Kite has reclaimed NDN play
for those whom it rightfully belongs to, her own brand of NDN child’s play
re-appropriated.
Kite and Cuthand’s work in Loner Culture expose the hurt associated
with NDN youth, but also a culture of light heartedness in working through hard
truths. Partying. Fetish pup play. But Fallon Simard’s trans guy memes are perhaps the
apex of NDN’s dealing with pain through the use of a signature senses of
humour. With his Trans Guy Memes,
Simard transforms common hurtful moments of transphobia he has experienced into
moments of laughter between those affected. From misgendering to the affect of
anger when cisgender men use single stall bathrooms to actually take a long
dump,
pointing to all
the situations trans folks have to deal with to simply navigate a bathroom
safely, Simard uses popular contemporary memes to speak back to instances of
transphobia and transphobic violence.
In another set of memes,
Simard overlays images of their chest post-surgery with layers of pink and
unfocused images, until the scars are indecipherable as anything other than a
beautifully made composition. Simard engages memes as both coping and healing
mechanism, arguing it’s OK to vent about systems of power that cause daily
harms, in a culture where so-called millennials are often shamed for doing just
that. Further, in a meme-ified culture that can tend towards glorifying coping
mechanisms that might cause different kinds of harm on the trans guy
body—self-harm, isolation, and taking poor care of one’s self—Simard shows there
is no shame in healing one’s hurt (or in using so-called unhealthy coping
mechanisms, for that matter). Every trans guy is just doing what he can to
survive.
In Loner Culture, Thirza Cuthand, Fallon Simard, and Kite fill a shared bedroom
with big feels and their loner creations. Loner
Culture attempts to connect all the bedrooms wherein NDN weirdos are
creating work that is never shared, bringing
together these separate times and moments which all mirror each other. With the early onset of the internet, what were the
digital networks that did connect NDN loner bedrooms?
Loner Culture is the
audacity of a future imagined and of a community created when one is told they
don’t have either. Loner Culture is
that wished-for future realized, and a beacon of home for all the NDN youths in
the struggle. We see you. We love you. Slay all day.
Jas M. Morgan 