Fugitive Rituals

8 anew/m# (detail), 2022, water colour drawings and digital collage

A new audio and drawing based installation titled 8 anew/M# opens July 30 to December 4, 2022 at the Agnes Etherington Gallery in Kingston, Ontario. The group exhibition is curated by Myung-Sun Kim also featuring the work of Nicolas Fleming, Sf Ho, Lisa Myers, Laura Pitkanen, Camille Turner and Alize Zorlutuna.

This new audio work features sound design by Stefan Nazarevich and taiko percussion by Linda Hoffman. 

‘8 anew/M#’ responds to a set of mysterious objects from the Agnes Etherington Art Gallery’s collection that are archived with the letter ‘M’. The work raises critical questions around the practices of collections in public institutions, from acquisition to caretaking, as well as their continued function and purpose. These M# objects in the collection came to Queen’s University in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from Japan or other parts of Asia, without concrete records on their previous ownership or origins. ‘8 anew/M#’ specifically re-opens the omikuji (fortune) box found in the collections, which is traditionally used at Japanese temples and shrines to cleanse the bad luck of the past year away, and to bring in the new year with a fresh start. The box is usually filled with divination sticks — with a shake of the box, a single divination slides out to reveal your lucky or unlucky fortune. A lucky fortune paper is taken with you back home, but an unlucky fortune is tied to strings along the temples or to a nearby tree to disintegrate over time.