Green Glass Ghosts
March 27th, 2021 - may15th, 2021
toni onley GALLERY
Featured Artists:
Rae Spoon & Gem Hall
Over the past year the famed Canadian musician, activist, and author Rae Spoon partnered with illustrator Gem Hall to produce Green Glass Ghosts, their first Y.A. novel to be published by Arsenal Pulp Press this spring. This exhibition will feature the original illustrations for this book.
At age nineteen in the year 2000, the queer narrator of Green Glass Ghosts steps off a bus on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver. Armed with only their guitar and their voice, our hopeful hero arrives in the West Coast at the beginning of the new millennium, and on the cusp of adulthood, fleeing a traumatic childhood in an unsafe family. They're eager to build a better life among like-minded folks, and before they know it, they've got a job, an apartment, openly non-binary friends, and a new queer love. But their search for belonging and stability is disrupted by excessive drinking, jealousy, and painful memories of the past, distracting the protagonist from their ultimate goal of playing live music and spurring them to an emotional crisis. If they can't learn to care for themselves, how will they ever find true connection and community?
The haunting illustrations by Gem Hall conjure the moody, misty urban landscape and represent a deep collaboration with the author based on their shared experience of seeking safety, authenticity, and acceptance on the West Coast. Green Glass Ghosts is an evocation of that delicate, aching moment between youth and adulthood when we are trying, and often failing, to become the person we dream ourselves to be.
Paul Crawford, Curator
About the Artists:
RAE SPOON
www.raespoon.com
Rae is a non-binary musician, producer, and author from Treaty 7 (Calgary) living on Lekwungen territory (Victoria). Rae is the author of the Lambda Literary Award finalist First Spring Grass Fire (2012), and co-author (with Ivan Coyote) of Gender Failure (2014). Rae was awarded a Dayne Ogilvie Prize Honour of Distinction by the Writers' Trust of Canada. They are the subject of a National Film Board documentary entitled My Prairie Home (2013), which screened at film festivals internationally, including the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. They have released ten albums for which they have been nominated for two Polaris Prizes and a Western Canada Music award. They are the founder of Coax Records, dedicated to work by marginalized musicians traditionally underrepresented in the music industry. They believe that the arts are an ecology not a business; That making space for other people’s stories (especially marginalized people) is more important than personal fame; That building community is opposite of loneliness. Rae supports other artists in forging their own spaces through industry workshops, sound recording, mentorship, grant writing and music production.
Rae is currently in recovery from cancer treatment in Victoria and an online campaign has been set to assist with their recovery and mounting medical expenses. You can find out more information and how you can help support Rae by clicking here.
GEM HALL
www.gemhall.ca
Gem is an itinerant interdisciplinary artist of mixed Romani/British heritage currently based on Coast Salish lands. Gem is interested in creative work as a means of survival and language to express stories and songs of resilience, recovery, diaspora and the magic of storytelling and witnessing. With a background in DIY/zine culture and queer and trans community organizing, they use illustration, textile work, writing, harp playing, tarot reading, and plant medicines to hold liminal spaces between worlds and ways of being.
Artist Statement:
By channeling and releasing what moves through me when I am inspired to do so, I aspire to honour the stories and spirit of the lands I move across, as well as the people, plants, creatures, ancestors, and bodies of water I am in relationship with. I hope this ritual will resonate and inspire others to do the same. I do so as a tool for my survival, as a way to connect, and also as a means to process & transmute my hardships into something abundant and supportive of that which I wish to thrive.
On Green Glass Ghosts:
Green Glass Ghosts is about searching for a sense of home, escaping abuse, queer, and trans displacement, substance use, mental health, resilience, living transiently, messy queer relationships, wanting to die, wanting to live, choosing sobriety as one path of survival, and the lifesaving magic of friendship, art, and music. As someone who has moved over 30 times in my life due to displacement, I feel a strong responsibility towards normalizing the experience of living transiently and promoting the idea that home can be something you carry inside yourself. I can't talk about queer and trans displacement as a settler in the colonial project that is called Canada without also talking about how I believe in treading lightly on the lands I move across, being open to ways I could learn to do a better job of this, especially in consideration that Turtle Island was violently stolen due to an ongoing Indigenous genocide.
I strive to honour and highlight this principle in all of my work, and I hope that comes through. I know that Rae chose to collaborate with me on this because we have a lot of parallel shared life experiences that are reflected in the work, which feels important to note. What isn't explicitly written, but informs this project a great deal is that it's a remarkable privilege that Rae and I are still alive, and I hope that comes through as well. We both carry immense grief and loss and are very aware that a lot of survivors of abuse and queer and trans people who live in poverty and struggle with mental health and harmful relationships with substance use don't survive the way we both have. We both had friends who passed away during the making of this book and the accompanying artwork due to complications with substance use and mental health. Creating it became a way to honour them in ways we hadn't imagined, while also encouraging each other to find new hope to carry on despite our own ongoing life struggles. The book and the way of life it describes makes me think a lot of the importance and beauty of building sandcastles, even if you know they're going to be knocked down by the next wave. Beyond our individual lives and temporary homes, this also makes me think of all the important and temporary collectives, venues and DIY and arts spaces I have loved, and all the ways they have re-formed and informed other spaces and projects that have come after them and the way this cycle also makes way for new ideas that need to exist while also composting some old ideas that need to die.
