GHOST DAYS
Terrance Houle
The Cube
June 30 to September 10, 2022
Curated by Chris Bose
This exhibition is the culmination of GHOST DAYS projects developed since 2018. Initiated in 2015, GHOST DAYS is an experimental art adventure, bringing together film, video, performance, photography, and music. This project conjures spirits and ghosts of Indigenous, colonial, and non-colonial history that exist in the light of night, as well as in the darkness of the day.
GHOST DAYS: Remains
I photographed this chair for a year and a half, and it haunted me. My parents are third generation residential school survivors. I watched as this chair slowly became part of the forest and was reclaimed by the land.
GHOST DAYS: The Bricks
An act of destruction on bricks that came from my mother’s residential school. Reclaiming the land through destruction and offering reclamation to my parents. Dealing with the land, reclamation, and destruction through acts of destruction—from land, to brick, to building, and back to land. The destruction of the chair, the wood, back to the trees, back to the land. Putting our bodies in the land in a vulnerable state of Indigenous brother-ship to reclaim our bodies, to reclaim our Indigenous male bodies, our friendship, our closeness, and our vulnerability. In this five-year portion of GHOST DAYS, I work with spirits, ghosts, hauntings, conjuring spirits from the land and the body and the sky. In the process of this exhibition, I am trying to reclaim the land in a vulnerable way. As me and Chris are reclaiming the land-spirit and our bodies, our Indigenous bodies in a vulnerable way. Our friendship and connection. As we place the landscape of our bodies on the Earth, we lie with the crushed brick.
Curatorial statement:
For me, the work that is in this exhibition is very much about reclamation. Of the self, the body image, the spirit, the land and the past. Taking back what was forcefully and brutally taken away from our families and our people. The act of destroying the bricks and returning them to the earth is a simple act, but powerful, smashing out that pain, that anger, that hurt and creating something new out of it, then returning it to the Earth is as good as it gets. Terrance and I started talking about this stuff a year ago and I had to trust in the process. I participated in the new work out of brotherhood, support, to get back to the land with a fellow artist, single dad, and human being.
Special thanks to Jacqui Bourdeau
Terrance Houle
Ghost Days, 2015
digital photo
