Everything is in the language we use

Jul 15 — Aug 22, 2020
Field:

Exhibition

 Location:

Gallery, Western Front

Description:

Everything is in the language we use was an exhibition featuring the work of Mercedes Eng, Emma Hedditch, and Lis Rhodes. 

This exhibition, which borrows its title from a poem by Layli Long Soldier, brought together artists who negotiate the distance between the seen and the unseen. Using word, image, and action, the artists engaged in an insistent gesture of making visible the legal, political, social, and economic systems that govern our lives. The works in the exhibition explored how language can be wielded as a tool to open up and break down structures of power. 

Everything is in the language we use was mounted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in response, took a hybrid form with content presented both in-person and online. The exhibition was accompanied by the weekly launch of a audio recordings featuring selections from Lis Rhodes’s book of collected writing, Telling Invents Told (2019), read aloud by artists and curators including Christina Battle, Almudena Escobar López, Annie MacDonell, Elizabeth Zvonar, and Crystal Z Campbell; a reading group of Mercedes Eng’s Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (2017) facilitated by Cecily Nicholson; and an audio description of Lis Rhodes’s film Journal of Disbelief (2000) created by Jae Lew, Cori Coutu, Emma Hedditch, and Tiffany Muñoz made available to stream online for a limited time. 

Hedditch also created two proposals focused on structural and administrative questions at Western Front. The first proposal took the form of a voluntary survey that was sent to staff and included questions about the various roles at Western Front. The second proposal was an instructional work connected to artist lodging at Western Front. Both proposals were made available as PDFs on the Western Front website.

Curated by Pablo de Ocampo.
In the middle of the half lit gallery stands a three metre, black and white projection screen with speakers on either side. In the projection is written, quote, in an email the National Coordinator for Domestic Extremism at Scotland Yard said he formed the view that the English Defence League were not extremist after reading their website, unquote. The projection includes a collage of text images writing, quote, the play continues, unquote, and, quote, of assumption, unquote.
In the middle of the half lit gallery stands a three metre projection screen with speakers on either side. Seen in black and white, the screen shows two police officers wrestling a person to the ground, as another person dressed in black stands facing them to the left. The screen cuts off at the waist in a high angle, hiding all of their faces.
In the middle of the half lit gallery stands a three metre projection screen with speakers on either side. On the screen are three thick lines in white, black and red, each slightly diagonal. The topmost white line creates a natural curved line, reminiscent of an ocean horizon. With the black line in the middle, the flowing white juxtaposes the straight-lined bright red portion at the bottom.
The door to the foyer from the gallery is flanked by two white sheets with survey questions and facts. The white papers loom above the door. The left sheet has a single typed paragraph occupying a quarter of the top, while the right sheet has three paragraphs covering half. The open door shows a nearly ceiling-tall green plant to the left, with Western Front’s entrance door illuminating sunlight into the foyer and gallery.
A corner of the gallery, illuminated by ceiling light, has two overhead tall white sheets pinned to a white wall in perpendicular orientation, on which is written an administrative questionnaire. The left sheet has text typed in the top half of the paper, and the right sheet has text taking up the top quarter area.
A white sheet with typed text in the corner of the gallery asks an administrative questionnaire about your institution’s workforce, representing Canada’s diversity. Below the question is an explanation of the Ontario federal inmate strikes that began due to a thirty percent pay cut by the Harper government, to recover costs for the government’s Deficit Reduction Action Plan. Since 1981, the average pay was three dollars a day, and the pay cut forced Corcan operations to shut down in prisons. Corcan operations made textiles, furniture and other goods for the, quote, war machine.
A white sheet with typed text in the corner of the gallery asks an administrative questionnaire about how your institution incentivises a multicultural workforce. Below follows a description of the Mississippi State Penitentiary by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Originally designated for black men, the penitentiary is, quote, reminiscent of a gigantic antebellum plantation, unquote, and the state was the first to implement conjugal visits as an incentive for harder work, unquote.
A white sheet with typed text in the corner of the gallery asks an administrative questionnaire about how your institution benefits from a multicultural workforce. Below follows a description of Federal Prison Industries' operations. The US government corporation inmates earn twenty-three cents to one dollar fifteen cents an hour, and FPI aims to integrate marketable job skills for inmates after their sentence. The FPI is restricted to selling its products to the Federal Government.
The seafoam green facade is half-shaded by a tree. A bike rack with two bicycles stands in front of three rectangular windows. The foyer is hidden behind three sheets of paper placed inside the windows. These sheets have typed text on the bottom half, near eye level, with an administrative questionnaire.

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Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.

We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.

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