This Sunday afternoon, I took a solo adventure to the National Gallery. Kathleen was with a friend at a Victorian hair art workshop and there was one exhibit I wanted to see before it closes next Monday.

I actually had an opportunity to see this exhibit earlier in the year in a session with its curator coordinated with the Ottawa Trans Library but I foolishly privileged my own sleep schedule instead and did not bother. It’s really too bad, but now I’m just glad that I didn’t miss the exhibit entirely!

The exhibit was Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works and, since I am not an art critic (nor am I well-equipped with the language of criticism and assessment), I will just say that I really enjoyed it and felt that her art and journey very much resonated with my own. There were even a few moments where I was stopped dead in my tracks seeing a piece, so it might have been fortunate that save for the security guard, I had the entire exhibit to myself!

Nobody I’ve spoken to who has seen it came away disappointed and that there is at least one middle-aged trans woman with purple hair who visited and found the right tuning fork, metaphorically-speaking. More than once! I love when that happens, but until the last decade or so, it was seldom.

Although I am confident that some of that can be chalked up to the repressed and dissociated version me living under a hardened shell, even today, I am left cold by the familiar (and less familiar) art of well-known masters. Sure, it’s interesting to see the original of a work I’ve seen reproduced countless times on mugs, aprons, buttons, and totes, but it’s not the same as the art itself resonating.

It’s the same reason I was always left cold by most classic literature. It was not until recently that I found literature that resonates with me and keeps me reading well past bedtime. Literature that doesn’t feel like a cleaning the toilet bowl, getting exercise, or eating more roughage used to be rare.¹

But, I digress.

After lingering in the Rutherford exhibit, I made my way to those on for the Sobey Art Award, a large prize for young Canadian artists, and found myself really inspired! In particular, by the exhibits of Hangama Amiri, Chukwudubem Ukaigwe, and Tarralik Duffy.

Finally, in the contemporary hall, I had the opportunity to see Greg Curnoe’s View of Victoria Hospital, Second Series, which was supported by a sound installation, and a QR code leading to a typewritten set of pages identifying the numbers on the painting.

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1. In hindsight, I suppose it’s fitting that the only assigned reading that *ever* had that effect on me while trying for an English minor 25 years ago was Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute (Bonheur d’occasion). ↩︎