My idea for the Focus exhibition was both pre-mediated and wholly spontaneous.

Since the passing of my maternal grandmother in late May 2021, I’ve been struggling to redefine what home is to me. She was my anchor, my safe place—the person who made me feel unconditionally held, and loved. Indeed, it was the feeling of being with her was “home” for me; it was never tied to the place I grew up and where she lived. Frankly, I couldn’t get away from my hometown fast enough! What’s more, until recently, I lived in Hamilton for seven years. Let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with “the Hammer,” but it just never felt like home. I would always say, it was the “place where my stuff was.” When I received the invitation to submit a curatorial proposal for the Focus exhibition, I was emotionally gearing up to move away from Hamilton. So, I sat with the invitation for a few days, unsure of what I could muster up in my transient state of mind and being.

One night, while watching my perennial favourite show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, I had to pause the episode because the idea for the place to which we return came to me so swiftly and with emotion that I immediately started writing my thoughts and ideas out on my phone. Except, the words flowed through me in a poetic way.

I don’t think I necessarily chose to write the curatorial statement as a poem so much as—as I said before—that’s just how it came out of me.

There’s so much emotion bound up in how we think and feel about home…for so many of us, “home” is a complicated, ever-shifting place. At times, it isn’t even a place, in the physical sense, but a feeling or person we cling to. I think poetry has the unique ability to work in the grey [area] of meaning(s), to express complex, often contradictory emotions at the same time. It tugs at our heartstrings much the same way our emotions of/about “home” do.

In my youth, I frequently wrote poetry and at some point in my late 20s, I stopped for whatever reason. Call it a lack of inspiration or life’s trials, verse just wouldn’t flow. So, it feels good to be able to express myself poetically again, even if I’m not poet, professionally speaking. The few folks with whom I’ve shared the poem feel it has resonance; I hope that visitors to the place to which we return feel the same too, whether it’s through reading the poem itself, or in viewing the works of art that embody the ideas my poem expresses.

The title is actually the final phase in the poem, which just felt poignant enough to title the exhibition. Initially, I had thought, “home is where the heart is” but that felt too colloquial. Still, I wanted something that got at the same idea. So, it was the natural choice.

Not knowing exactly who I’d work with and what works I’d select from artists and galleries participating in the Fair, I knew I needed an exhibition title and curatorial concept that was open and expansive enough to incorporate diverse lived experiences, cultural perspectives, and artistic approaches. In this way, “place” or home, is seen as both tangible and intangible: it can be body/self, a person/relation, a feeling, a dwelling space, our Mother Earth, and so on. I wanted to hold space for the reality that we can carry multiple notions of home simultaneously, and that these notions can shift throughout our lifetime. In this way, home is a deeply relational concept: it’s individual and yet collectively felt.

What’s more, in continuing to align my practice with my values, I knew going into this opportunity that I was—without question—going to centre Indigenous and immigrant/ racialized artists for whom ideas and feelings of “home” are particularly complex and bound up in feelings of dispossession/rupture, displacement/relocation, and longing/nostalgia. I want to complexify how we conceptualize home: it’s not always a joyful or safe place, and our feelings about it can be contradictory and messy. It’s not about assigning value judgements, but rather about capturing the myriad of ways artists reflect on and visually express their feelings and ideas about home.

I think the artists whom I’ve curated into the place to which we return all explore home in ways that are intimately bound up in their lived experiences.

For some, home is body: the vessel that carries us through our human existence. Home as body intersects with the ways that society and popular culture deem our vessels imperfect, inadequate or abnormal because we don’t fit a normative standard of beauty. In contrast, for others, home is externalized in the vessel of another being, a relation that makes them feel “at home.”

Still for others, home is land/territory, a physical terrain, a “homeland.” Homeland can be so complicated, most especially for colonized peoples and/or peoples experiencing the ongoing effects imperialism and capitalism. So many emotions come into play when trying to process connection/disconnection, memory/nostalgia, etc.

I think visitors will happen upon some artworks in the exhibition which might, on the surface connote the quotidian “things” we see in home spaces, but they are imbued with far more layered meanings.

A major undercurrent in the exhibition is a critique of extraction, or unfettered consumption. This was not intentional per se, but in surveying in the works in the exhibition, it’s not hard to percept a meta-narrative of the ways in which we’ve exploited our Mother Earth, and the dire, ongoing consequences this has for us as a human species.

We’ve become so disconnected from the [Mother] Earth; I don’t think the average person really sits with the reality of our fragile human existence. We’re literally on a space rock flying through space-time at a dizzying speed while everything outside the protection of our atmosphere and gravitational field is trying to kill us! This is no exaggeration (talk to an astrophysicist). But really, how lucky we are to live on this planet. Truly, I feel most human, most grounded, when I contemplate the ways this “pale blue dot” has protected my existence since the day I was born.

It’s at the forefront of my curatorial practice for two reasons.

Firstly, because it energizes me when the artists with whom I’m engaging feel a connection to the curatorial theme(s) and feel that the space I’m creating will serve their artwork in a good way. I love learning about their creative process and how their life’s journey is reflected in what they put out into the world through their art. As much as possible, I always want to ensure there is creative/conceptual alignment between myself and the artists I curate. Their “buy-in” to the curatorial vision is a crucial step for me…if the theme(s) isn’t landing, I reassess my curatorial direction.

Secondly, because of historical exhibitionary practices of Indigenous art, culture, and well, bodies. In the past, Indigenous peoples, and peoples colonially deemed “Other”, were denied the right to (re-)present themselves and their cultures. They had little to no say when, where, and how their ways of being were exhibited, and in this way, they were denied sovereignty of self and of Nationhood. However, for more than forty years in the Canadian art context, Indigenous artists have been unapologetically demanding the right to self-determination within museum and gallery spaces. I humbly walk the pathways they “bushwhacked” for me as Métis Auntie, Marjorie Beaucage, would say. Said differently, we are best equipped to speak about who we are and what informs our creativity, which can be anything and everything!

On a more serious note, in my full-time role as Hatch Curator of Indigenous Art & Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, I’m mandated to work in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), now federally implemented with Bill C-15, and actioned by the Canadian Museums Association (CMA) via the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action #67, out of which the CMA created the Moved to Action Report for the museums and heritage sector. In a nutshell, best practice is free, prior and informed consent. In this way, we cannot and should not display any cultural belongings—or “art”—without the express consent of living artists, their next-of-kin / relations (if in spirit world), or the permission of their communities. Working this way respects Indigenous creative sovereignty and the cultural sovereignty of Indigenous Nations.

I hope the place to which we return offers a moment of pause, of reflection. The Fair is exciting, but at times, it can also be overstimulating. I hope that, in offering up such a grounded thematic exhibition, it can offer visitors to the Fair a moment to reflect upon their own relationship to “home.”