She’s there as I round the corner.
A sprawling humanoid figure, larger than life, seems to rise from the gallery floor in a twisted crawl. Her shielded face gazes off somewhere to my left, wholly disinterested in me. I approach carefully. Sanguine eyes peer out from behind an elaborately decorated mask, complete with abstracted crocodile scales and a forked tongue. Tattooed hands appear to evaporate, gold-coated finger-tips coiling upward. Banana-flower breasts extend to the ground, supporting her weight like excess limbs, while her legs, detached and contorted, lie as if in wait to rejoin the main body. Her tusked vulva flowers in warning, its eye-like clitoris glaring outward. Around her emerges a dynamic sprawl of fabricated plants—passion flowers, lichen, sampaguita—and patches of clay. These comprise the furthest extensions of her sundered eco/bio-logical anatomy: some burst through her back and legs while others penetrate the gallery, the earthier masses matching her rust-coloured flesh and evoking the red soil of Sri Lanka. To her right, white walls are broken up by tattoo-like vinyl decals—one for flora, one for fauna—mimicking the abstract patterns which adorn her frame.
This is Efflorescence/The Way We Wake (2023). It is the first, temporally and spatially, [1] of two collaborative pieces by artists Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos in a duo exhibition of the same name at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art. Drawing on the artists’ shared affinities for myth-making and critical reimaginings of the colonized world—from Perera’s sci-fi-inspired diasporic travellers [2] to Santos’s pluralistic asuang [3]—the sculpture presents a new mythic figure who moves forward and responds to her environments (past, present, and future) through constant processes of transformation and self-construction.
There is something curious that happens, however, when you work in an art gallery. The unclear becomes clear and then unclear again. The unified becomes contradictory, as that which you thought you understood about an artwork is repeatedly complicated by every new person who passes through, every question and comment. Such has certainly been the case for Efflorescence/The Way We Wake. Interpreted both as monster and mother, figure and landscape, body unformed and re-formed, the sculpture is rife with ambiguity and even contradiction. Even its title is ambiguous, for while efflorescence denotes a process of blooming and culminating, wake might refer at once to an act of emerging from slumber or to an aftermath: the track left on water after a moving body has passed through, the turbulent drawing-apart of a once-complete surface. [4] In the wake of migration or the world-breaking violence of colonialism, how does one wake? How does the undone effloresce?
If ambiguity is integral to this sculpture, however, it is perhaps nowhere so evident as in its complex materiality. Constructed from Styrofoam, steel, and polymer clay, the work’s material footprint stands in stark contrast to the soil and flora it represents. Instead, these materials are striking reminders of the importance of longevity in artistic production and collection, which art theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay has attributed to the deeply interconnected histories of colonial plunder and the category of art [5]. Here, the figure’s transformative processes appear doomed to live in a body which is fixed and built to last forever, marked by the material realities of art as both an industry and an imperial category. [6] Furthermore, the longevity of these materials renders them powerful ecological contaminants, with Styrofoam in particular remaining one of the most abiding and abundant pollutants today despite decreased commercial use. [7] Pollution here should not be seen as a mere byproduct of capitalist production, for both settler and exploitation colonialism are fundamentally about land. Inhabited landscapes are radically transformed in order to alienate and replace their Indigenous inhabitants, both human and non-human; vibrant lifeworlds are broken apart and categorized, reduced to resources awaiting extraction. [8] Ecocide is not secondary to colonialism but constitutive of it.
How, then, do we grapple with the materiality of Efflorescence/The Way We Wake? [9] How do we make sense of these apparent contradictions between content and form, between a pluralistic body that transforms and challenges colonial violence and a fixed sculpture that necessarily exists within the constraints of a still largely colonial industry, at the expense of the environments it represents? This is certainly a daunting task. Rather than reading the sculpture’s materiality as a hindrance to the transformative power of its subject, however, I would like to propose that it be read as a tangible enactment of this figure’s plurality.
Writing on the cultural hybridity surrounding the Mexico-US border, feminist author Gloria Anzaldúa claims that the hybrid subject must embrace multiplicity as a means of surviving and overcoming the world-breaking violence of colonialism. [10] “But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions,” she writes. [11] “At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once [...].” [12] She expands this idea to say that the hybrid subject “operates in a pluralistic mode” that embraces ambiguity. [13]
“Not only does she sustain contradictions,” Anzaldúa continues, “she turns the ambivalence into something else.” [14]
This passage reveals the power of ambiguity. Plurality is survival; contradiction is the path to the creation of the unseen, the elsewhere. This has potent repercussions for Efflorescence/The Way We Wake. The work’s materials—those long-lasting sculptural media which seem at odds with the transitive and eco/bio-logical forms they represent—reveal how the sculpture itself, like its subject and creators, “operates in a pluralistic mode.” They underline the ongoing colonial reality that we all inhabit, both within the art industry here in Montréal and across the globe, wherein resource extraction, global trade, and artistic production exist hand in hand. The sculpture necessarily exists within and engages with this reality while imagining something beyond it. It is not doomed by its categorization as an art object, but uses this status to present a moment of transformation which is uncategorizable, taking the wake (of migration, of colonialism) in all its gritty messiness and turning it into something else.
This is the power of Efflorescence/The Way We Wake. It is, at every turn, multiple—both in content and form—and this multiplicity is its wholeness. Its complex and at times contradictory materiality renders it more than a representation of a pluralistic mode of being, allowing it instead to exist staunchly within this mode. It asks: How might this body transform next, and on what shores will it stand? What might exist in the beyond, where the flowers are flowers and the soil is soil?
[1] The second is an in-situ mural on the third floor gallery (G3). It will inevitably be painted over in September in preparation for the next exhibition, making it both an ephemeral piece and a permanent (albeit soon-to-be-hidden) fixture of the gallery.
[2] Perera’s multidisciplinary work has often imagined a future inhabited by these travellers alongside nonhuman “droid” lifeforms, while in recent years these have been complicated by a turn towards revealing what Sayem Khan calls “unseen presents [...] stained by the past.” See: Sayem Khan, “Rajni Perera / The Vessel with Two Mouths,” Patel Brown (May 12th - June 17th, 2023), accessed Jan 11th, 2024, https://www.patelbrown.com/rajni-perera-the-vessel-with-two-mouths; Negarra A. Kudumu, “Traveller Persists,” rajniperera.com (September 2019), accessed August 4th 2024, http://www.rajniperera.com/traveller-persists-by-negarra-a-kudumu.
[3] Santos has devoted a large part of her practice to the aswang: a mythic being, monsterized by Spanish colonizers, with the ability to bisect and reassemble her body. Her paintings mobilize this figure to explore the plurality of the diasporic condition, wherein one survives and thrives through a “conscious decision to be multiple.” See: Marissa Largo, “Folklore Reimagined: The Decolonial Diaspora Aesthetic of Marigold Santos,” in Les Mythologies singulières, ed. Anna Torma, Claire Labonté, Marigold Santos (Montréal, QC: Les Éditions de Mérius, 2016): 118-160.
[4] I should note here that this ambiguity surrounding the term “wake” has already been activated poignantly by Christina Sharpe in her writings on Blackness in the afterlives of slavery and ongoing colonial violence. See: Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016).
[5] Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “2.1: Transcendental Imperial Art,” in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London, UK: Verso, 2019), PDF.
[6] On the seeming unimaginability of art which is not defined by notions of newness and eternity or by such spaces as the museum or market, Azoulay says: “This is not because anti-imperial positions are unimaginable, but because their materialization as art necessarily dooms the objects to become embodiments of this one particular idea of transcendental art.” (Azoulay, “2.1: Transcendental Imperial Art,” 2019, emphasis added).
[7] In 2016, polystyrene (estimated to take over 500 years to decompose) accounted for about 30% landfill volume worldwide, a statistic which does not account for the high volume of Styrofoam debris in waterways and ecosystems. (Manu Chandra, Colin Kohn, Jennifer Pawlitz, and Grant Powell, “The Real Cost of Styrofoam,” Experiential Learning Project for St Louis University, 2016, https://greendiningalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/real-cost-of-styrofoam_written-report.pdf)
[8] The centrality of climate change to settler colonialism has been discussed by, among others, philosopher Kyle Whyte and art historian Heather Davis: Kyle Powys Whyte, “Is it Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice,” in Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledges, Forging New Constellations of Practice, ed. Joni Adamson, Michael Davis, and Hsinya Huang (Earthscan Publications, 2016), 88-104 ; Heather Davis, “The Breathing Land: On Questions of Climate Change and Settler Colonialism” in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, ed. T.J. Demos (Routledge, 2021), 204-213. Additionally, the theoretical flattening of lived environments and their inhabitants under extractivism, a key driver of exploitation colonialism, has been discussed by philosopher/artist Denise Ferreira da Silva and filmmaker Arjuna Neuman in: Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, “REDSHIFT,” in Soot Breath: Corpus Infinitum, ed. Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman (Glasgow: CCA Glasgow, 2021).
[9] While my analysis here takes a more critical look at the materials of Efflorescence/The Way We Wake as they relate to environments and the imperial category of art, it’s important to note that the question of “materiality” surrounding this work is not straightforward, nor is the relationship between the artists and the imperial history of art. Sayem Khan, for example, uses “materiality” to refer to Perera’s active engagement with the tactility of tradition as a means of re-evaluating the present (Khan, “Rajni Perera / The Vessel with Two Mouths,” 2023). Furthermore, Perera has recounted her own fraught relationship with museums, art, and artifactuality in: Rihab Essayh and Rajni Perera, “I’ve never seen a hero like me in a sci-fi - A conversation Between Rajni Perera and Rihab Essayh,” PHI Antenna (Sep 9th, 2020), accessed Aug 5th, 2024: https://phi.ca/en/antenna/ive-never-seen-a-hero-like-me/.
[10] While Anzaldua’s work, like all responses to colonialism, is temporally and spatially specific, her sentiment of multiplicity seems to echo in both Perera and Santos’ works. This reflects clearly in Santos’ “conscious decision to be multiple” (see note 3), while Perera’s nonlinear temporalities embrace a different kind of multiplicity and challenge the linearity of colonial time as described by Azoulay (See: Khan, “Rajni Perera / The Vessel with Two Mouths,” 2023 and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “2.5: Imperial Temporality,” in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London, UK: Verso, 2019), PDF).
[11] Gloria Anzaldúa, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2012 [1987]), 78.
[12] Anzaldúa, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 78, emphasis added.
[13] Anzaldúa, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 79.
[14] Anzaldúa, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 79, emphasis added.
This article was written as part of Platform. Platform is an initiative created and driven jointly by the PHI Foundation’s education, curatorial and Visitor Experience teams. Through varied research, creation and mediation activities in which they are invited to explore their own voices and interests, Platform fosters exchanges while acknowledging the Visitor Experience team members’ expertise.
Author: Fiona Vail
Fiona Vail (she/they), a settler born on unceded Mi’kmaq land, is an aspiring scholar and artist now living in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). She recently graduated with an honours BA in Art History from McGill University, where her research focused on naturecultures, multispecies relationalities, and linguistic coloniality in contemporary art. In their personal practice, they use mixed media techniques to explore animality, gender, and the intersections of “classical” and personal mythologies.
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