Intent

November, November is a project for my grandmother, Dorothy Josey and a response to Canada 150, the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation celebrated in 2017. The project hinges on a contradiction I believe is fundamental to Canadian identity: the cognitive dissonance between the love, pride and belonging we feel for our families and the fact that our country’s story is violent and rooted in the genocide of Indigenous peoples. November, November attempts to hold these facts together in one object. It asks: how do we reconcile between these realities; how do we move forward from a state of conflict; and under what banner? 

Work Narrative

November, November arose from the conflicted atmosphere of 2017. As Canada prepared to celebrate its 150th anniversary, major protests and increased public pressure were pushing Indigenous perspectives into the mainstream. Headlines such as, “Canada is celebrating 150 years of… what, exactly?” captured the mood. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls held its first community hearings. And artists, like Raven Davis, popularized inverted and upside-down images of the Canadian flag.

In this atmosphere of public reckoning, my practice consisted largely of learning my family’s story in Nova Scotia / Mi’kma’ki and producing text-based works with International Signal Code flags. I began to ask myself if a flag could ever represent something other than colonial violence? Or if the form itself was inherently violent?

To respond to this question, I searched my life for a gesture, story or object as opposite to violence as I could imagine, and landed on a quilt my grandmother made for me as a child. Over the years, this particular quilt had become a touchstone for my connection to family, through and despite the process of coming to terms with my sexuality. It was, I believe, an unspoken gesture of acceptance towards my emerging difference.

November, November then began as a digital restoration this quilt. Sun-damaged and fading in 2017, I scanned and reassembled the quilt’s fabrics in Photoshop. Through a combination of digital techniques and hand-painting, I reproduced the fabric’s original design and had the restoration reprinted on marine-grade polyester.

With assistance from Michele Stevens and the Michele Stevens Sailloft in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, the restored fabric was “quilted” into a 3 x 9 meter flag. The flag was designed specifically to replace one of two large flags on the Halifax-Dartmouth waterfront during Nocturne: Art At Night 2017.

The pattern of November, November references both the original quilt and the nautical code flag, “November” which is used to signal, “No” or “Negative.” However November, November's pattern is greatly extended, opening up a possible interpretation as a repeated or an emphatic, “No!” The pattern also references digital space, wherein repeat-checkering is used to indicate negative space, erasure or the empty parts of image files.

In this way, the making of the flag is an act of love, but it’s display is an act of protest. 

While November, November was commissioned to temporarily replace a large Canadian flag on the Halifax or Dartmouth waterfront, permission to do so was denied by the Halifax Regional Municipality throughout 2017 and again through 2018. While city staff supported the request, neither law nor policy was cited as the reason for refusal but rather “interdepartmental politics” within the HRM Parks Department. The Halifax Pride Festival received similar answers in response to their requests to fly the Pride flag at these locations from 2011–2016.

November, November was instead exhibited as an installation at the Khyber Centre for the Arts. A series of (10) smaller flags were flown by the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, beneath the intended flagpole, in support of the project.

Interpretation

November, November is a hybrid object. It combines the visual languages of quilts and nautical flags—domestic and public makers of Atlantic Canadian material culture. It may be interpreted either as language or abstraction; as an act of love, or an act of defiance.

It is a complex piece in my broader practice, exploring my interests in queering the languages of public space; addressing the contradictions which shape public discourse; and encouraging hybridity within a culture increasingly shaped by polarization.

My hope is that November, November stands as a question to patriotism, provoking us to reconcile between the violence which established the system we live in and the love—the often familial love—that holds it together.

Exhibition History