Join us this Saturday for a series of Home/land & Security events at the main RENDER exhibition space and at Waterloo Architecture and the Grand House in Galt.Roundtable with H&S curator and artists @ RENDER, East Campus Hall, 1-4pmOpening of second installation for H&S @ Waterloo Architecture, 6-9pmOutdoor Video Screening @ Grand House, Ainslie Street North, 7-9pm

JEFF THOMAS: The following text is an example of what can be learned once the lines of communication are open. While Jamelie  Hassan was telling me and my son Bear the following story, I could not have imagined two Cree women living in the Middle East.

JAMELIE HASSAN:  Growing up in southern Ontario in the city of London, I was obviously conscious of my Arab identity but also conscious that my reality was in proximity to the neighboring Oneida community. My father took us on Sunday drives on gravel side roads that led to the Oneida settlement 22 kilometers outside London. The Oneida farmers in this agricultural heartland of southern Ontario offered us woven baskets full of apples and pears. In 1840 the Oneida Nation in New York was facing certain annihilation and began their migration to other parts of the USA and Canada. They bought land south of the Thames River in southern Ontario and became part of the Six Nations. By the 20th century, the Oneida Nation in New York that had once held six million acres of land had only 32 acres left.

The nurturing of friendships and solidarity that my parents had with First Nations communities was reflected in their other political allegiances, including throughout the 1950’s working in support of anti-colonial struggles, including Algeria’s resistance to France and giving support through Canadian community organizations to Palestinians after their dispossession in 1948.

I was a young art student when I traveled to Lebanon in 1967 for the first time. I stayed with my aunt and uncle in the small mountain village of Baaloul in the Bekaa Valley. In the early hours of the morning, as I would wait for my bus to take me to Beirut where I was attending art classes at the Academie Libanaise de Beaux Artes, (ALBA), I was often greeted by three elder women, who were baking bread and who would invite me to take my breakfast with them. As I sat within the domed space of the traditional clay oven, my eyes burning from the rising smoke, I could see the amused expression that passed between the women. As tea with bread, cheese and apricot jam was offered to me, one of the old women would laugh, give me a gentle pinch on the arm, and say - “you think you are the true Canadian but we are the true Canadians”. While I did not understand what was meant by her words, their laughter, their expression and especially the pinch stayed with me over the years. A decade later my brother and Ottawa-based writer, Marwan Hassan, was to add another piece to this puzzle. He traveled to Lebanon to the same village of Baaloul and stayed with the same aunt and uncle. This is what he learned - two Cree sisters had met and married two Arab men, who had immigrated from Lebanon to Canada in the early 1900’s. Marwan wrote of one of these men:

“After the first world war, homesick and not in good health, he longed to return to the old country. His Cree wife and the Canadian born children re-emigrated with him. About sixty years later this old woman I had met was that West Cree Woman, an Arabic speaking Muslim living in the little mountain village of her dead husband. Her sons in turn had migrated to South America sending the grandchildren back to the village in the summers to be with her, their Arab, Muslim grandmother who, as you can tell, was a true Canadian.”

Here in this fragment of an unofficial narrative, you can imagine the Arab men who had traveled to Canada in the late1800’s to early 1900’s, who, like many Asians, had worked outside the dominant commerce of colonial Canada that was controlled by the British or French interests. Montreal was an important connecting site where many young men were outfitted with suitcases to work as peddlers. Many, like my maternal grandfather and my father, traveled into southern Ontario. Some journeyed further west, working closely with native communities in the fur trade; others moved south to the United States, taking jobs with the railroad and as farm workers.

(The Pinch is an excerpt from a larger text, “Across Landscapes of Diaspora & Migration” presented at a conference at the Lebanese American University, Beirut, 2007 and variously reconfigured for various formats.)

“Prior to my conversations with Jeff Thomas about his Home/land & Security project, I had been in an antique market in St. Jacob’s and saw a fragment of a wooden fence with black text that read CROWN LAND BEWARE on it. I bought the fragment to consider it in a future work. Later a group of us involved in the Home/land & Security exhibition met in Cambridge with Jeff Thomas and Andrew Hunter. Laura Knap was at the meeting and suggested we make a visit to Grand House Student Coop to consider this location as well for a potential exhibition site. I was struck by the Grand House site, in particular the “ghost” steps. I had been thinking about the use of wooden survey sticks which are white with red tops  and I kept coming back to this idea as Jeff talked about surveyors a lot & mapping  - public space, private property and land issues. I was thinking of ways to use the survey marker sticks within a structure somehow on the obsolete steps at the student’s housing co-op. I decided to create a gate-like barrier/screen with wooden sticks that I painted red and white and install this structure at the based of the steps. The structure includes the found CROWN LAND BEWARE fragment and also a half wheel wooden fragment that I found in a flea market in London. This structure was built with the technical assistance of Ron Benner.

Three original found survey marker sticks are installed at Render, situated with a photo from family archives and photographs I took of the The National Museum of Beirut, with a soldier guarding this site. In Lebanon the security barriers that continue to be in use, are painted red & white. There is an obvious link with security measures.” - Jamelie Hassan

Artists: Barry Ace, Sara Angelucci, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Michael Belmore, Ron Benner, Rosalie Favell, Lorraine Gilbert, Jamelie Hassan, Pat Hess, Penny McCann, Wanda Nanibush, Shelley Niro, Bear Thomas and Eric Walker.

Introducing the artists to Emily General: The Conversation

From the inception of Home/land & Security I imagined bringing a disparate group of artists together to talk about their impressions and ideas of home, land and security. The scenario I envisioned for the exhibition space was drawn from my childhood visits to the Six Nations Reserve. It was there that I learned about my Iroquois history from my elder Emily General, who had been an educator and a highly respected political activist in her day.

I used to sit in Emily’s kitchen and listen to her conversations with old colleagues, family and friends - stories about Joseph Brant, the Haldimand land grant, legal battles with the Canadian government, and wampum belts. I was particularly intrigued by the ease with which everyone spoke and the transformation of a typical early 19th-century reserve farm kitchen into a type of think tank.

My childhood memories of Emily’s kitchen table and the importance of political activism and dialogue became the prototype for this exhibition space and for the bringing together of these twelve. Caledonia still looms as an unresolved backdrop and will remain so until we find a common ground to begin talking to one another and bridging imposed racial borders.

As part of my research for this exhibition, I made two road trips along the banks of the Grand River with my son Bear, tracing it from its humble beginning as a small creek flowing through a cow pasture to the place where it empties into Lake Erie. I envisioned that these photographs would become part of the conversation about home, land and security.

–Jeff Thomas

In 1764, Mohawk leader and war captain Joseph Brant led almost two thousand Iroquois followers from their ancestral homeland in New York State to land along the Grand River in Southern Ontario. The reason: Brant supported the British during the American Revolutionary War and, in the process, lost the Mohawk homeland in New York State to the Americans. In return for Brant’s service, the British Crown bought almost 2 million acres from the Mississauga people and transferred the land to the Mohawk. The land stretched the length of the Grand River and six miles on either side of the river and was known as the Haldimand Tract. By doing so, the British hoped to create a buffer zone between any American invasions via the Iroquois. The Iroquois were forced to redefine their sense of homeland and security.

When I define the words ‘home’, ‘land’ and ‘security’, the history of Brant comes to mind through the stories my elder Emily General told me when I was a child visiting the reserve with my grandmother Clara Thomas. Making our way from Buffalo to the reserve, I would think about the land of my ancestors as I caught glimpses of the Grand River and passed through small towns with names like Cayuga and Dunville. Today, the Six Nations Reserve is only about 5 per cent of the original Haldimand Tract.

Our journey always began and ended with a stop at the U.S./Canada customs booth at the Peace Bridge. When asked our citizenship we always answered “Six Nations”. This is where my definition of home, land and security begins. When the land issue erupted in the town of Caledonia in 2006 and the people from the adjacent Six Nations community stopped construction of a residential subdivision known as the Douglas Creek Estates on a disputed piece of land, news reports flashed images of groups from Six Nations and Caledonia hurling insults at one another and violence eventually ensued. The view through the television screen transported me right back to the Wild West movies I watched as a kid, with the Indians still portrayed as the bad guys.

When Andrew Hunter approached me with an offer to curate an exhibition of my choice on the theme of Caledonia, I thought about the world Brant and his followers envisioned after dealing with land-hungry Americans and the ancient Iroquois concept of negotiation, acceptance, peace/understanding and respect. It was codified in a document called the Two Row Wampum Belt and with that in mind, I began to assemble a group of artists from my life, whose work I respect and felt confident they could join me in this conversation on home, land and security.

- Jeff Thomas, Guest Curator

This project has received the generous support of the Canada Coucnil for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Jeff Thomas, The Delegate posed along the Grand River, Waterloo, Ontario, 2009 (GPS: N43 21.452 W80 19.002)

Click on the image below to get a free MP3 download of Chris Flanagan’s new album along with more information about the Cambridge soundtrack project.

Back in 2007, RENDER commissioned artist/curator Jeff Thomas to develop an new exhibition/research project in response to several land disputes along the Grand River that are focussed on the land granted to the Six Nations by the British Crown in 1792. The resulting project titled Home/land & Security features new works by a dozen artists all reflecting on complex issues of home, identity, place and security.

Artists: Barry Ace, Sara Angelucci, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Michael Belmore, Ron Benner, Rosalie Favell, Lorraine Gilbert, Jamelie Hassan, Pat Hess, Penny McCann, Wanda Nanibush, Shelley Niro, Bear Thomas and Eric Walker.

The exhibition runs November 5, 2009 through February 12, 2010 and will be accompanied by a series of discussions and events. Stay tuned for more details and dates.

Chris Flanagan: Cambridge

Record release and RENDER social

October 15th from 8-11pm at RENDER, East Campus Hall, University of Waterloo

October 17th from 7-9pm at School of Architecture Cambridge and 9-closing at the Black Badger Pub on Water Street in Cambridge

TWONIE bar at both events

This past spring, RENDER commissioned artist and DJ Chris Flanagan to produce a new work and the results will be launched at two upcoming related, but distinct, events on October 15th and 17th. Flanagan has created a new musical score in response to recordings found in the many junk shops and thrift stores around the region, places he is consistently drawn to to feed his voracious appetite for vintage and obscure vinyl.

Chris: “One of the businesses that seems to be thriving in this climate are the thrift stores which pepper the townscape. It was these that originally brought me to the region several years ago, on the never ending quest  for strange and obscure vinyl records. As a collector and DJ for over 10 years, music subcultures and record ephemera have permeated my installation practice. For this project, I’m composing a soundtrack for Cambridge built entirely from samples taken from  vinyl records sourced from the City’s many thrift stores. This will not be a “mixtape” of various songs but rather entirely new compositions based on reworking snippets of hundreds of hours of music. These albums, the source material for this new score, are the aural refuse of the town’s inhabitants which bore witness to the drama of their lives over many years.”

Flanagan’s new score has been pressed as a limited edition vinyl record and surreptitiously returned to the thrift stores in which the original albums were found. (For those unwilling to scrounge through thrift store milk crates -the record will also be available for sale in limited quantities at both events.) Both events will include additional visual and installation components.

Join us on Thursday, October 15th from 8-11pm at the main RENDER space in East Campus Hall to hear Flanagan’s score and to enjoy an evening of music DJ’d by the artist.

Join us again on Saturday, October 17th from 7-9pm in the atrium of the School of Architecture Cambridge for the official record release, the festivities will continue at the Black Badger Pub on Water Street until closing. 

RENDER would like to acknowledge the passing of Gerald Ferguson, a truly unique and influential Canadian artist. Jerry was both a friend and a mentor to RENDER Director Andrew Hunter and he will be deeply missed.CBC story 

We’ve installed Seth’s exhibition at the Niagara Artist’s Centre in St. Catharines. In addition to the exhibition, the members of NAC collaborated with Seth on the construction of the Wine King Float for this past weekends Wine Festival Parade. The NAC exhibition opens on Friday, October 16.MORE ABOUT SETH @ NAC