It is rare for me to fully experience a gallery by myself. A day at the gallery becomes a date or outing with family or friends, which, don’t get me wrong, is one of my favourite things to do. Spending time with someone who doesn’t have the same background as I do and seeing them experience art that they have never seen before is lovely – and sometimes comedic. However, to be alone with your thoughts and emotions and being able to experience an exhibition or gallery is something I truly cherish.
In this instance I had the pleasure of seeing the exhibition “How long does it take for one voice to reach another?” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. I am lucky enough to have had the opportunity to visit this exhibition not once but twice, after having it saved on a tab in my phone since it was announced this past summer.
The exhibition explores its own name: How long does it take for one voice to reach another? I found this especially pertinent, given that we are collectively navigating the universal experience of isolation during the past few years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The human voice is reflected upon in both a physical and metaphorical sense in the exhibition, asking through art how we find meaningful connections and allow voices to be heard. The question comes from a line of poetry by activist Carolyn Forché, and holds a broad message in our current history, as we live in a world when too many voices go unheard and those that are listened to, are mediated.
Making my way to the entrance of the exhibition, I can feel my excitement turning to pure awe. Rarely am I ever starstruck by art, and by this, I mean so utterly blown away by a piece that I truly don’t know how to react. As I am confronted with the presence of Rebecca Belmore’s Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to their Mother (1991), I find myself struggling to compose my thoughts. An enormous wooden megaphone looms over you, standing in the entrance room, in stark contrast to the clean, white, rounded walls that enclose it. To say I was speechless, is quite frankly an understatement.
Belmore’s work was originally created in response to the Oka Crisis in 1991, a sculptural and performative piece that responds to issues of colonial violence and marginalization. Travelling between Indigenous communities across ‘Canada’, Speaking to their Mother initiated a dialogue between Indigenous voices and the land making poetic action a political protest.
As you stand in the small space you are surrounded by the audio recordings from one of the gatherings, immediately drawing your attention to the voices that our colonial society has become accustomed to tuning out – forcing you to listen to the voices and stories that must be heard.
Speaking Across Time and Space
As I traverse into the adjacent gallery, I am greeted with the ubiquitous white cube that has become a familiar sight in many museums today. Yet here, the works are displayed together in an unlikely combination. On one wall a Rodin hangs across from Beauty in Our Lines (2019), an embroidered ink drawing by Inuit artist Niap (also known as Nancy Saunders). Niap has sewn traditional Inuit tattoos that were reserved for women (tunniq and kakiniq), that relate to the different stages of an Inuit woman’s life. Due to the fact that Christianity that was forcefully imposed on Inuit communities by colonial authorities, the practice has gradually faded away. Through sewing these tattoos back onto an image of her grandmother’s unadorned hands, Niap is restoring visibility and survivance, which enacts a strong and tense dialogue between the classical European artworks that hang beside it.
Upon first glance, the pieces don’t seem to make much sense together – how could a nineteenth-century European sculptor, for example, have anything to do with a contemporary Inuit artist? Each piece calls on voices of the mystical and metaphorical with messages being shared between the living and dead. I will admit I was lost at first when entering the space, seeing so many contradicting pieces from different times displayed in the gallery. However, it was interesting to see how the gallery found such strong commonalities within its expanse of varying collections.
Listening with the Body
I pass through another gallery, filled with neutral paintings on its walls until I am confronted by Geneviève Cadieux’s Hear Me with Your Eyes (1989). The work is comprised of three prints of Cadieux herself that fill the gallery walls and completely engulf you in the images. This piece – along with so many others – is one that does not hold the same weight when you see it on a screen or in a textbook. The small images losing their detail and emotional weight. But in person, it begs for your attention as Cadieux’s face evokes pleading cries of pain in a still room. In this way, Hear Me with Your Eyes uses the vulnerability of the human body to transmit sound through a two-dimensional image.
What become even more powerful as I sat and stared at the images that surrounded me was the fact that I could still hear the voices of Belmore’s installation. The faint sound of the recordings echoed through the space as I observed an image of someone one crying out but never heard.
Making my way into the adjacent room, I passed the works of Ying Gao, Betty Goodwin, and Nick Cave, whose works had me speechless once again. Each piece using the shared experience of vulnerability to express how the human body is the vehicle by which voice is transmitted – and in turn – listened to. What was so beautiful about each work was how they used movement to show the relationship between bodies. Nick Cave’s Soundsuit (2014) had me transfixed on every button and piece of fabric utilized in the sculptural suit. Although exhibited as a sculptural piece, Cave’s suit is meant to be worn and used as an extra layer of protection for the wearers body while simultaneously allowing them to communicate with the people around them. As Cave explained the piece would “hide gender, race, class”.
Flanking Cave’s piece were Ying Gao’s Uncertainties 1-2 (2013). The two kinetic garments created interacted with your voice, moving in waves and ripples with each word spoken. I would have never seen this happen if it were not for the kind security guard standing by. A sign beside the garments stated that you must speak in order for the pieces to react; however, the idea of talking at a normal register seemed to break the socialized etiquette of the gallery space that – at this time – was filled with peaceful stillness. Thankfully the guard saw my confusion on my face and began speaking for me, which allowed me to experience the beautiful motion of the steel pins attached to the garment.
Voice of Resistance
Making my way into the room titled “Voice of Resistance,” I immediately spotted a small 8 by 11-inch framed work hanging alone on the far wall. A single page from Nadia Myre’s Indian Act (2002) overshadowed all works in that space. Comparatively tiny in size but imbued with equal cultural and historical significance. The Indian Act was created to force the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into a non-Indigenous, Eurocentric society. By using the traditional method of beading, Myre reappropriates the legislative text to subvert its meaning and criticizes it as an artifact of a patriarchal colonialism.
Invaders (2021) by Hannah Claus, which hangs adjacent to Indian Act uses the same ideas. Claus references the symbols of the Covenant Chain, seventeenth century treaties formed between the Haudenosaunee and the British Crown. Copper pins adorn the surface of a red wool Hudson Bay blanket, which allude to the broken and superficial relationships never upheld by the colonials. Although I was extremely grateful to experience these pieces in person, I had yet to fully appreciate the weight both these works would have on me in retrospect. The ever neglected and overlooked voices of Indigenous peoples permeated through the materials and craftsmanship.
Silent Witnesses
Entering the next room, the echoes of Belmore’s performance become ever distant, replaced by the mechanical hum of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Last Breath (2013). Perpetually circulating through the dying breaths of Quebec poet and LGBTQ+ activist Nicole Brossard, Lozano-Hemmer’s artificial respiratory system preserves a sign of life that will endure well past that of the individual.
The machine, similar to that of a respirator, acts to communicate one’s final moments. Yet here we also see something associated with illness and hospitalization being subverted in its meaning, used instead to signify the presence of life.
Voices in Unison
As I walked down the hall the hum of the machine drifts into the background and I could start to hear the sound of a choir in the distance. A piece I have waited to see since I was sixteen was seconds away.
Janet Cardiff’s Forty-Part Motet (2001), is sung by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir – forty voices individually recorded singing the sixteenth century motet Spem in alium nunquam habui (Hope in any other have I none). Each voice emanates from its own speaker standing at an average human height. The works speaks volumes about the power of both individual voices and the coming together of voices and humans.
And for me… it had to be the most emotionally powerful artistic works I have experienced to date.
When I entered the room, I made my way around the circular set up of the speakers, leaning in to hear each voice. In the centre of the room were three benches and I quickly made my way to sit in the very middle of the room, directly below a skylight in the ceiling.
Art in all of its forms affects everyone differently and I am never ashamed to say that it has a very visceral and emotional effect on me. In this case, the voices in their perfect clarity and thundering volume brought me to tears. I am not a religious person, but the beauty of this piece did feel spiritual. It brought you out of your senses and in a way cleared my mind of the complex processing it was trying to manage while going through this exhibit.
The Forty-Part Motet was in my eyes the perfect culmination of ideas in this exhibition. The human voice is reflected upon in its individual and collective power and demands the viewers to listen. Through art we find meaningful connections and allow all voices to be heard across time and space, and this exhibition was a wonderful reminder of that.
