Grass Widows
Curated by Kristy Trinier
With special contributions by Susanna Jablonski and Faye HeavyShield
February 29th – September 10th, 2020
Southern Alberta Art Gallery
601 3 Ave S, Lethbridge, Canada
Straw is preceded by fresh
green grass. For this reason, I will begin with grass widows. Nowadays a woman
is called a grass widow whose husband had to leave home (for example, obliged
to work far away from his family). Alternatively, she may be a divorced woman
or a woman living apart from her husband. In all those cases she is not really
a widow, but not quite a married woman either.
—Grass Widows
and Straw Men, Anatoly Liberman
Santiago Mostyn weaves a narrative that echoes over
generations, the restless urge to set out in search of a better life, and the
reverberating consequences of these journeys. Grass Widows collects these as
blades of stasis amongst disparate paths of migration, within a knotted
contemporaneous context of those who fled persecution, those who left to build
a new utopic community, and those who set out on paths of discovery, profit and
adventure.
Mostyn’s detailed research includes archival images from
the estate of school teacher Prentice G. Downes, following his inland travels
in the subarctic north. Centred in the space are floating and translucent
images marking the lost first generations of the Black homesteaders’ community
at Amber Valley, a group of families who fled racial hostility in Oklahoma for
Athabasca. The experience is resonant to Mostyn’s childhood departure from
America for a liberated Grenada and Zimbabwe; a reverse-diasporic journey
described by the artist’s father, Akinyele Sadiq as: “sharing in the
excitement, frustrations, struggles, failures and successes of a people digging
their way out of 400 years of slavery, colonialism, exploitation and
degradation.”
From the perspective of what resides amongst a waiting
“displacement or at least in-betweenness”, Mostyn’s recent works Altarpiece and
Red Summer Edit parenthetically lie aside a Cordyline fruticosa plant,
traditionally used to mark land boundaries on the island of Tobago. Situated in
front of an intentionally re-opened gallery view towards the Canadian winter
landscape, bathing under the dystopic encouragement of simulated sunlight, the
Rayo plant is representative of the solitary view of these surrounding works,
dense in their criticality of globalized and systemic colonial forces of
oppression, and the ‘impossibility of return’ for those who continue to seek
fertile ground.
Santiago Mostyn (b.
1981) makes films, installations and performances that test the divide between
disparate cultural spheres, employing an intuitive process to engage with a
knowledge and history grounded equally in the body and the rational mind. He is
based in Sweden but maintains strong ties to Zimbabwe and Trinidad &
Tobago, the countries of his upbringing. Mostyn co-curated the Moderna
Exhibition 2018: With the Future Behind Us, Moderna Museet’s survey of
contemporary art in Sweden, and has exhibited widely at venues including the
Rencontres de Bamako (2019), Gothenburg Biennial (2017), Moderna Museet (2016),
Kunsthall Stavanger (2014), and Malmö Konsthall (2013). Recent exhibitions
include Not a Single Story II at Wanås Konst, Survival Kit 10.1 at LCCA Riga,
and The Measure of All Things: On the (In)Human at Lunds Konsthall.