We would like to thank JAYUxGuelph for their invitation to be featured in the second season of their podcast, The HumxGuelph. This is a transcription of said podcast (Season 2, episode 9). You can listen to the podcast here.
Charlotte: Hi, I’m Charlotte Eagleson and this is The HumxGuelph. This episode is a special collaboration with delve Magazine where I sit down with the co-creators Callie Gibson and Christopher Lim to talk about the importance and impact of art history on social movements and human rights. Enjoy!
Hello everyone. I’m currently sitting down with Callie Gibson and Christopher Lim.
Callie: Would you like us to formally introduce ourselves?
Charlotte: Sure!
Callie: So, I’m Callie, I’m a third year Art History and Classical Studies double major at the University of Guelph and I’m one of the co-founders of delve.
Chris: I’m Chris and I’m a third year Art History major and I’m also one of the co-founders of delve. I mean, I like to quip that I’m the other half of Callie’s brain when it comes to this venture!
Charlotte: Nice, nice. So, just to get started, what was the inspiration for creating delve?
Callie: Well, Chris and I met in our classes, we met through our Art History courses and both lived near each other and we were both complaining about the same thing. We thought that there wasn’t enough representation for art history students and specifically majors who write primarily for their degree. There isn’t much opportunity for them to showcase their work or get their ideas heard.
Chris: I think the issue is, especially in the field of art history, we don’t get that representation, especially for marginalized groups. The whole foundation of art history and the theory associated with it tends to be grounded in Western ways of seeing, and even the pedagogical approaches are rooted in Western theories. See, we want to turn that on its head and highlight how black and indigenous peoples see the world. Especially young and emerging black and indigenous artists, writers, that sort of thing.
Callie: We wanted to do it in a more accessible way, because getting someone to read a lengthy and dry research paper is not very easy. So, we wanted to do it in a magazine format so it’s a lot more intriguing and accessible to people who perhaps don’t know, or should I say, aren’t in that ‘art realm’. Having pictures and a magazine that you can hold in your hands would be a lot better.
Chris: We are trying to model the magazine after more established publications like Canadian Art and Border Crossings but gear it towards younger people. The art world tends to be a very sterile space that is not necessarily the most inclusive, and we’re trying to change that in our publication.
Charlotte: No, I honestly love the concept for your magazine, I think it’s so cool. When I found out Callie was, you know, doing this, I saw it online and I was like “delve!”. She posted it in her story saying “I did this! This is my thing!”. I was like “Oh my god!”!
Callie: Surprise there’s two of us!
Charlotte: Yes! Big surprise. I love that you’re providing artists who might not have a platform. You’re giving them the ability to be seen and you’re boosting their voices. So, how are you doing that? What steps are you taking to provide artists of equity seeking groups a voice on your platform?
Chris: So, we wanted to highlight and center their voices. It’s more that a lot of the struggles of Black and Indigenous artists is that they don’t see themselves represented in the media, institutions, academia or in the art world. So we wanted to change that, and do it in a way that doesn’t necessarily come from the perspective of enriching ourselves. I know a lot of organizations, especially now in the wake of Black Lives Matter and Every Child Matters, everything that has come to life, a lot of companies and organizations are jumping on that. We don’t necessarily know if that’s coming from a place that’s authentic, so for us it’s more about moving out of the way and letting them speak for themselves in their own words. We don’t want to engage in any sort of tokenization, we just have the desire to change things the way we can change things. We are two students, just like yourself and your organization, we just want to increase awareness of social issues.
Callie: I just wanted to emphasize that we have never experienced these things that we want to talk about and touch on. So we want to provide a place for Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and LGBTQIA2S+. We don’t want to speak over them, we don’t want to have our narrative written over their stories. Not that we aren’t in a position to write about it, but it would be much better if it could be heard, understood and seen from the perspectives of people identifying under those titles.
Chris: I think that it’s so important because all these different cultures, genders and gender identities see the world in very different ways and through very different lenses. We don’t want to impose our lens on their world. That is the biggest problem with a lot of allyship these days, people want to open up these spaces but they still operate under the lens of white supremacy and of the west. It’s just normalizing the sharing of their experiences in their own world. They themselves are the authorities of their experiences. They are in the best position to articulate those experiences be it through art — Art is a really interesting medium because there is an inherent universality to it where other cultures can see things and question the world around them. Art is a medium, for a lack of better words, where cultures can often meet in the middle.
Charlotte: Do you have anything to add, Callie?
Callie: We had an example of what we are trying to do. We want to move against providing hollow gestures. It’s good to post on your stories awareness and to get voices heard, but instead of posting a little black square on your Instagram, we actually want to provide a place for voices to be heard. An example we thought of was that my friend Bella Lánci and I did a print-sale. We hand made all these prints, we sold them and gave them 100% of the proceeds. We also want to state that reparation doesn’t always have to be money, you can offer in other ways, and with our magazine we want to do that by providing a platform.
Charlotte: Okay, that’s actually really cool, so instead of taking all this performativity that you see online a lot now, this magazine is providing the opportunity to go further but through artistic means and using art as a paradigm in a sense.
Callie: We want to give back what we took from these communities, and that’s not really monetary in value, it’s their voice. So we are giving the space to do that.
Chris: I mean, when we were discussing and conceiving this publication, we wanted to know how we could be very different from things that had been done in the past. The idea of reparations comes up a lot, and you need to put your money where your mouth is. Reparations can come in many forms, like what Callie did making the prints, and I thought that was really good. She used her own artistic practice coming from a position of privilege to give back to the community who have traditionally been marginalized. Again, getting away from those hollow gestures.
Charlotte: After looking over your website and looking through your personal statements about what delve Magazine is all about, Chris I noticed that you have these self established “4 I’s”. Those being Intersectional, Introspective, Inclusive and International, and that is the basis of delve Magazine. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit?
Chris: With inclusivity we kind of wanted to go beyond just talking about marginalized people, we want to actually include these voices in our editorial mandate, which guides how we organize ourselves. We actually have a stipulation where a proportion of our editorial team in time will actually come from these marginalized voices, so they can actually guide those decision making processes so it;s not always the two of us gatekeeping those voices. It’s kind of going against the [conventions] of western modernity and the normativity that’s established itself within artistic institutions such as galleries and museums, it’s all very sanitized and we wanted to get to the rawness of people’s art practices because I think that’s how they articulate their voices next.
Callie: I can take International, that one’s very self explanatory. I also want to give credits all to Chris for these four Is, it’s all his creativity. International is exactly what it says. It’s just talking about how art practices have become more diverse and that there is tons of multiculturalism nowadays, you’re exposed to so much and we just wanted to explore all kinds of different art and not just focus everything on western origins and western perspectives. Because it’s all fun and good for Chris and I to take over and write everything, but we want writers and perspectives from a whole bunch of different backgrounds.
Charlotte: I love that. So what does the Introspection and the introspective ‘I’ mean to delve Magazine?
Chris: When you look at someone’s art, it’s not just a way to understand other cultures and other peoples, we want to understand how we relate to those cultures. When you look at an art piece, this is something alot of people I feel don’t really think too much about, but it’s actually a way to reveal more about ourselves. It’s so powerful because it makes you reevaluate yourself and your place in the world and how you see the world. The institutions can only change when people realize that they are not good, and I think those oppressive systems continue to exist because people tolerate them. Being exposed to those different viewpoints, it’s a journey that you take and it’s not something that will change with a flip of a switch. Just me being at a loss for words that describes that feeling of introspection, I think every person has to undertake that journey on their own. It doesn’t even have to come through art. Even just listening to other people speak about their experiences and truths. I think the art that we present should make people think critically about their world.
Callie: Yeah, and there is this really great TED talk by a curator in the States named Nina Simon. She had this whole TED talk about participatory museums, and it really puts into perspective what introspection is trying to do. The concept was basically participatory museums, where they get you involved with the exhibits. One of the activities was the museum offering this tombstone cleaning field trip, and it was done weekly to bring together groups of people who otherwise would not have talked, met, or collaborated with each other. It was with homeless people and volunteers from the museum. In any other situation, there would have been a sense of fear and judgement from certain individuals. They got to talk and hear these people’s pasts and perspectives, and they got to collaborate on this shared project that was for the greater good, cleaning these tombstones. It really just brings to light how much everyone does have in common. No matter where you are from, what you do, or what your background is, you have a lot more in common with people than you think, and we have to celebrate that diversity and bring people together, and our magazine will hopefully be able to do that. Watching that TED talk, I really took a step back and I was like “woah”, I have some of these judgments, I have some of this stigma, and if I was in that situation, I would likely have felt uncomfortable. We want to give stories and articles that show people stuff they normally wouldn’t have a chance to see and reflect on that.
Chris: Mainstream media is usually heavily curated. We want delve to be a place where artists can unwind and speak their truths.
Callie: Yeah, we want it to be really raw.
Charlotte: You talk about this idea that even though we may come from different backgrounds, or hold different identities or labels, we can still appreciate a common good and that can come from art and the introspective nature of art. The intersectional ‘I’ in your mandate, does it apply to the idea that you can come into a common space with different lived experiences?
Chris: I think that is such a good point because academia and even some contemporary activism has this tendency to silo issues and compartmentalize them. You look at feminism and feminism alone, and Black justice and only that, or you look at environmental justice on its own. What people sometimes don’t realize is that these threads all intersect. I wouldn’t even say intersect, they are so entwined with one another, and you can’t talk about climate justice without addressing the elephant in the room; the fact that Indigenous peoples and their relationality with the land is so integral to understanding how to actually fix this problem. When you look at feminism, the writer bell hooks critiqued the foundations of the second wave of feminism, and how it often excluded the experiences of Black women. People face different levels of oppression, and when you simply lump them together, you find it actually marginalizes those other experiences. That’s what we want to do with our magazine, not looking at just a single issue but how they are connected.
Callie: That pretty much encompasses it. We don’t want to just look at one piece of the puzzle.
Charlotte: I love what Callie brought up with the puzzle piece analogy, where you can be one part of a larger picture, but you can still represent your own lived experiences and it can come into the art world as part of a greater vision of activism.
Charlotte: The latest piece published by Callie is titled ‘The Vitality of Resilience’. It discusses how the development of art history depends on the resilience of artists. In your introduction, you discuss circumstantial resilience and the need to break from tradition. Can you expand on that?
Callie: Circumstantial resilience can be a confusing term, but to break it down it refers to artists and individuals responding in the moment. Lots of things happen in the world, this is a known fact. Genocide, oppression, war, feminism, these are all things that influence how we react to social change. The resilience is born from what is happening around those people, and it is represented in their art.
Chris: To add to that, art is usually a response to the world and we go back to this point of how articulates lived experience. When you go back to Ancient Greece, a lot of the myths in that world were allegorical in nature and very didactic in teaching people how to live their lives based on what was happening at the time. I think that’s the same thing that’s happening in the contemporary moment with social change and how art responds to it. It’s also very cyclical in nature. Art responds to social change, but it can also be a vehicle that drives social change. I think that’s a really interesting way to frame the vitality of resilience is that it is such an important component of societies moving forward and people expressing their truths.
Callie: Expanding on the Classical point and the origins of mythology, a lot of it came from experience. In Ancient Greece, people were simply walking around and upon hearing echoes in the forest, and they were like “what’s that?” They rationalize this by making up whole myths with characters, gods, entire stories. This is how they expressed the situations they encountered. Although it can be very far-fetched, this is similar to how it is done now. We’re not representing echoes or finding etiological origins for everything around us. Now we’re reacting to things that are much more fluid and dynamic.
Chris: Going back to rationalization, I can’t speak for everyone, but I feel that the process of art making comes from a really deep place of trying to make sense of the world around us. I think that’s what makes art so powerful, the infinitesimal possibilities to explore so many perspectives, it’s a never-ending process. It’s change and growth in a nutshell, that’s why art plays such a role in social change. It’s a space that’s been sorely underutilized by mainstream institutions, and I feel the art world isn’t really channelling those forces in a way that is necessarily conducive to the change we need to see in the world today.
Charlotte: I have a question here about how breaking tradition in art parallel social justice in human rights movements. But, I think that we did sum that up really well with Chris saying that, “Art is a response to social justice and human movements, but art can also be a vehicle which pushes society towards social change”. But is there anything else that you have that you would like to add?
Chris: One of my favourite artists right now, her name is Leanne Simpson, and she is Anishinaabe. She is from an area of what is now Eastern Ontario. She speaks her truths, like she speaks to the land. A lot of her academic practice comes from how land can be used to teach important lessons in life, and I think she articulates those Indigenous lifeways so well. I’m not going begin to attempt to paraphrase some of her stories, if you are interested you need to check out her work for yourself. She speaks about the importance of the land, and I feel that Western education systems focus more on individualism; what Leanne Simpson actually coins as extractive capitalism and how diametrically opposed those two systems are. I found that her artistic practice opened my eyes to the inherent relationality which exists in how Indigenous individuals see the world.
Callie: When we look back in history we have very specific titles for what is happening around us. Everything is labelled, like ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Medieval’, we know what that is but we put these titles on these events. Those weren’t titles which they gave themselves and are not what the people of these periods identified as. When you are looking into history, specifically Art History, you want to put yourself into their position instead of looking from a very modern and contemporary perspective.
Chris: Positionality is so important, when you look at, speak about, or write about things you have to be cognizant of your position and relationships with the subjects you’re talking about and attempting to articulate. It is so important to recognize because understanding that relationship to what you’re seeing helps clarify things.
Callie: You can look back and say, “Why did they do these things? What position were they in to make these decisions?”. Even when looking at paintings, “Why are they using these colours? Why are they portraying themselves this way?”. It’s difficult to remove yourself from your contemporary position where you know a lot about the past, but put yourself into their position and the very small world they were working with.
Charlotte: I actually love that. I have never thought about art in that sense. I don’t have the art history background by any means…
Chris: I don’t think you even need an art history degree or a formal education. The whole concept of a formal education is a construct, really. Again, when you go back to Leanne Simpson and the Anishinaabe use of land as pedagogy, I think that in itself speaks volumes of how much we as settlers and descendants of Western systems have imposed these methods of seeing the world on others. You can see that destructive effect in the forms of environmental degradation, the violence enacted against Indigenous women and children, the ongoing genocides which have continued to happen and continued to be perpetrated by these systems. Even outside the context of Art History, that is something that should be more universal. Be more critical about how you view things. For us that’s art, for someone else it could be literature, it could be poetry, taking a walk outside and thinking about how you relate to the world.
Callie: Moral of the story, it’s really easy to sit back and criticize what has happened in the past. However, you need to put yourself in a place to see where the people of history, and those who made these things which we’re looking back on, have come from.
Charlotte: There are so many things that I hadn’t even thought of when we planned this Podcast. I was just like, “I’m going to get delve on here, and we’re just going to talk about maybe some art history and how it relates to human rights”. I am not a very artistic person, I go to art galleries and look but I haven’t ever taken the time to think about how art can do so much for the world, period.
Chris: I think you boil down a really great point. Looking in itself, and just seeing the world as a practice in itself is something that you can be critical of. It’s hard for people to sometimes see and understand that seeing is a practice, and being cognizant of how you see the world is really important.
Callie: You have to consciously think about things, and consciously think about how you’re looking at the world. You likely have to change how you’re looking at the world! There is a little bit of self reflection to do there.
Charlotte: Yes! Very much so. Thank you so much Callie and Chris.
Callie: Of course!
Chris: It was such a pleasure!
Charlotte: This has been amazing, so insightful. That’s all I can say. I just wanted to say thank you so much to Callie Gibson and Christopher Lim for this very amazing interview and for helping out with this episode of the Podcast. If you want to find out more about delve Magazine check out their Instagram at @delvemagazine_. If you are interested in being featured or getting involved, email them at delve@uoguelph.ca or find the call for submissions information at www.delvemagazine.ca. I’m your host Charlotte Eagleson. This has been the Hum x Guelph, a production of JAYU x Guelph. You can find more information on Instagram or online at www.jayuxguelph.ca.
Further Exploration:
Check out JAYUxGuelph: www.jayuxguelph.ca or their Instagram @jayuxguelph
Link to Leanne Simpson’s work: https://www.leannesimpson.ca/
Participatory museum TedTalk by Nina Simon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIcwIH1vZ9w
