Curatorial text by Ana Harbec for the Medalta International Artists in Residence program 2025 Solo Exhibitions

i. The Watchers

Not just beautiful, though—the stars are like the trees in the forest,
alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.
– Haruki Murakami

Have you ever felt the benign but intense sting of unseen eyes upon you? Perhaps the tiny forest of downy hairs on the nape of your neck stood suddenly at attention, pulled up magnetically by the unknown gaze in the same primordial way young sunflowers move their heads throughout the day to face their obvious god: the Sun. Maybe you craned your neck quickly, so sure were you that someone, something, proximate was looking. Who’s there? Though in this strange encounter (that I suspect has some kind of universality) the watcher remains unseen, occluded, concealed, invisible, they are none-the-less felt.

Artist Stefanie Smith has spent the better part of her year at the Medalta International Artists in Residence program carefully building a world that seeks to give form to such typically invisible watchers. Smith’s whimsical ensemble of mythological characters, hand-built and wheel-thrown in porcelain and then meticulously etched into being, feel distinctly archetypal and circumstantially ancient.

The vast and sprawling mythological canon of ancient Greece includes, for example, dryads—mythical tree spirits, whose stories curl and wind throughout the follies and the triumphs of the gods and demi-gods. An ever constant amid the drama is the dryad and her tree, quietly observing the tumult of Greek mythology whose cadence is more akin to our frenzied world than the slow peaceful amble of the forest. In Japanese Shintoism, the Kodama are watchful and enigmatic spirits that protect the forest and ardently observe those who traverse their arboreal realm. Medieval European churches, cathedrals, and architecture, broadly, are replete with occurrences of the pre-Christian holdover Green Man, an arcane sculptural element comprising a face shrouded by foliage and flora. Often inconspicuously situated on a cornice, the Green Man simply, quietly, watches. The first section of the ancient Aramaic Judeo text The Book of Enoch is entitled “The Watchers.” It details the trials of a group of fallen angels tasked with watching over humanity. Watchers, it seems, are proliferous across time and tradition.

Though Smith’s creatures, some which populate a many-branched central fungal armature (itself reminiscent of Yggdrasil, the cosmic Norse ash tree, the principal structure that binds all realms of existence, or more contemporarily the Great Deku Tree in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda) are singular and not specifically homaging or referencing the cultural touch points I’ve noted here, they engage tacitly with this rich mythological canon of the spirits who watch. In her exhibition you’ll find wondrous chimeric beings, at once hooved, winged, and scaled. The antlers of Smith’s deer are tender fronds of otherworldly exotic plants. Owl-like faces grace her marine creatures’ piscine forms, rendered in classical—but here, surprising—composite poses. The more canine-seeming beings in the artist’s preternatural world recall the Capitoline Wolf, suckling Remus and Romulus. Mythologies intersect and abound in “The Watchers,” though in a wholly exceptional permutation. In Smith’s verdant realm, as in the lores of centuries and millennia past, the common feeling of a frisson is surely the requisite outcome of being watched.

ii. The Queer Transcendence of Rotting Fruit

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpeck’d cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—
All ripe together
In summer weather,—
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy:
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.”
– Christina Georgina Rossetti, Goblin Market

A German man named Johann Joachim Winckelmann is largely credited with the invention of the discipline of art history in the 18th century. In his seminal essay “Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History” contemporary art historian Whitney Davis argues that art history, via its foundations with Winckelmann, is a field perpetually and iteratively torn asunder by the competing and conflicting demands of aesthetic idealism and a mourning of that which has been lost—the piling wreckage of history—to the river of time. Davis argues that the root of this divisive nature of the discipline is Winckelmann’s queerness, itself expressed in his melancholic longing, which was vitally integral to his life’s work and thus structurally integral to the field of art history itself. I’ve always thought of art history as a malleable container, a generous vessel within which any number of ideas, worldviews, cultural phenomena, political constitutions, zeitgeists, historical overtures, eruptions of injustice and concomitant activism, or societal happenings could be held within. This, I believe, is continuous with the assertion that art history is inceptionally and continually a queer discipline based on longing.

Take the genre of the still life, for example. The earliest known still life works grace the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs. In the throes of the Classical period in Greece, the famed artists Zeuxis and Parrhasius are said to have entered a competition to ascertain who could paint the more realistic still life. Zeuxis legendarily painted grapes so life-like, that birds swooped down and pecked at the canvas, believing them to be real fruit. Parrhasius then asked Zeuxis to pull back the curtain concealing his painting; Zeuxis gladly obliged, realizing too late that the curtain was itself the painting. To trick a bird is one thing; to trick a master ancient Greek painter is apparently quite another. The trompe l’œil, whose inception we see in this parable, plays on the tension between surface and depth, between what appears and what is; just as queerness is a process of resisting essentialist readings of literally anything, the trompe l’œil likewise undermines our cognitive impulse and the social imperative to understand reality via empiricism alone. “Things are not always what they seem,” wrote Plato’s interlocutor Phaedrus.

A Classical 4th century BCE mosaic—Winkelmann’s favoured art historical period—discovered in Türkiye depicts a reclining skeleton and a still life of wine and bread, with the Epicurean message “be cheerful, enjoy your life,” which always makes me think of the contemporary queer clarion call “be gay, do crime.” Sometimes joy itself can be the most salient resistance; this is certainly the case in Etty Anderson’s “FANCY PRONK: The Queer Transcendence of Rotting Fruit,” a beguiling and frenzied array of lush ceramics installed to invoke the bountiful art historical traditions of the still life. In Anderson’s installation, apple slices and half peeled lemons, their rinds curling away from their fleshy bodies, butt against life-size and greater-than-life-size medications in dulcet two-tone coloured classic pill shapes. Lucious bunches of grapes, glossy, dimpled, and cool-hued—not aspiring for Zeuxis’ verisimilitude, nor for a purposeful surreal unlikeness, but for a secret, third thing—spill over squished tubes of toothpaste whose contents are spewed out; here, as elsewhere, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Locks and keys, spongy slices of cake, tall cans, nail clippers, and revered morel mushrooms—many imprinted with an abstract and mutated flower pattern that recalls both Dutch Delftware and contemporary luxury brand insignia—occupy the mise-en-scène of Anderson’s still life, queerly collapsing all categories and hierarchies of things in a way as wondrous as it is political.

I get the distinct feeling that in “FANCY PRONK,” every object has some kind of significance—coded, personal, or queer, each odd coupling a wink to those in the know or a private smile between the artist and themselves. In this way, Anderson’s exhibition cites the inherent queerness of art history, throughout whose entire canon queer desires were likewise covertly expressed via codes and nods across centuries, mediums, cultures, and genres including—but not limited to—still life. Yet, and like the winding list of dazzling forbidden and cursed goblin fruits in Christina Georgina Rossetti’s seminal poem Goblin Market, we ought to be reasonably weary of the history of still life, itself burdened and beleaguered by its colonial trappings. The Dutch Golden Age is considered the historical apogee of the still life, a genre eagerly employed in that era to showcase the colonial plunders achieved by the small European nation. In Dutch still life paintings, the oranges are perfect, the figs sumptuous, the lobster fresh, the grapes plump, and the melons replete with seeds and flesh—all colonial acquisitions. In “FANCY PRONK,” the fruits are blissfully rotting, imperfect, strange, queer—distinct from the perfection common to Dutch still life painting. Yet, Anderson’s fruits are beautiful in the way all rotten things are: it is often from rot that life is born anew.

iii. frogsong

The 30th of March was a bright warm day,
the first really warm one; the frogs sang again,
and seemed to be waked up from a winter sleep.
It was like the most beautiful and unearthly music,
as if the earth itself were breathing and singing.
I felt as if I were standing in the very midst
of the orchestra of the spheres.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Every spring in Grandview, Manitoba was heralded by the resonant and warbling chanting of the frog ensemble: the amphibious harbingers. Their conductor was the invisible hand of changing seasons and many hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Gathered in stands of sibling poplars—little sprouted green islands on the otherwise vast and ocean-like expanse of prairie—the frogs would sing day and night (a primordial love song) to the damp applause of the quaking aspens whose round leaves rustled by the wind always sound like the rushing water of a small river just out of sight. Until one spring, when the armyworms arrived and the frogs stopped singing.

Melanie Barnett’s “frogsong” eponymously takes for seed the ambient amphibious singing from her childhood in rural Manitoba and the subsequent and abrupt cessation of said song upon the advent of a destructive species of worm and moth. The arrival of the armyworm compelled a difficult decision amid possible agricultural tragedy. The choice was between Scylla and Charybdis, that is to navigate between a sea monster and a deadly whirlpool, or the choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, as it were: should local farmers sacrifice their grain yields and livelihoods for the year or spray pesticides to save them, while jeopardizing what was left of the native ecosystems of the area? “It was a terrible year for new pants,” the farmers would say for poor crop-yielding seasons. Ultimately, the fields were sprayed, the worms were exterminated, the grain was saved, and the frogs quietly disappeared by the wayside.

From this parable, Barnett has spun and carved a complex and ever-evolving speculative agricultural ecosystem, rendered in vibrant and meticulously detailed ceramic works. In her exhibition, the quaint but stubborn colonial cultures of the rural Canadian prairies mingle with the many strata of local flora and fauna; from microbiomes and darling star moss to fungal fairy rings, worms, and frogs, aspens, and grain fields. In “frogsong,” the domestic rituals of rural life—housekeeping itself as a kind of longing—are represented by porcelain finger sandwiches whose real-life counterparts were arranged meticulously on the finest China platters at family events and community gatherings throughout Barnett’s childhood in rural Manitoba. Yet, despite the pomp of their presentation, the sandwiches would most often comprise Miracle Whip egg salad or otherwise Kraft singles and bologna. Barnett’s clay “dainties”—sweet desserts elsewhere simply called “squares”—are topped with moss and other local flora, a sort of inverse function of how the expanse of the quartered and tilled Great Plains looks exactly like a homemade quilt from above. These are Barnett’s complex reckonings about what constitutes “home,” and who belongs—or doesn’t—there.

If a swan song is a final glorious effort before one is done creating, then maybe a frog song is an incantatory bellow made as one returns home, a homecoming chirrup: a reprise of the chorus, a new beginning of the ancient cycle of seasons that turn and turn, ad infinitum. An eternal return. Barnett references the adage that moss tends to grow on the north side of a tree as a fact fed to her as a child—the information was deemed important as a wayfinding or survival technique should one find themselves lost in the forest and needing to return home. Yet, the aspen forests native to the area were all clearcut many years ago to make way for grain fields. The moss: a useless navigator without a forest, like the land spiritually fallow without the song of the frogs.

About a decade after the armyworm almost-catastrophe, something miraculous happened: the frogs returned, triumphantly if perhaps changed somewhat by their hiatus, to sing spring into being once more. Perhaps the aspen forests may return home one day too. Though we may not always have north facing moss to follow, a primordial, abstract yearning and sometimes a concrete real desire to return home seems to be a rather universal feeling among all the living world. Perhaps after all, there is a there, there.

iv. Epilogue

Though these three artists—Smith, Anderson, and Barnett—taking part in the Medalta International Artists in Residence program have created their own discrete bodies of work for exhibition, the retaining walls of their respective practices have in places breached, auspiciously. White Wonder bread finger sandwiches appear, though bearing different meanings, in both Barnett’s and Anderson’s exhibition, for example. Goblin fruits are of the realm of fairy rings. There is a common thread of mythology and the codex of an art historical language in Smith’s work as in Anderson’s. And between Smith and Barnett, a shared wondrous exploration of an expanded consideration of ecology—magical, fictive, fungal. Perhaps these are the outcomes of a kind of productive artistic contagion, of a creative entrainment, of a symbiotic ecology.

The artists did create one truly collaborative work together: Just so we don’t lose this: The arrangement of and relations between the elements of an ornamental structure from which one or more jets of waste matter discharged from the bowels are pumped into the air in a manner consistent with the critique of wasted or spoiled food and other refuse as from a kitchen or household, more colloquially known as “shit fountain.” Important elements of each of the artists’ work are cobbled together in this working fountain which playfully mocks the pomp and grandiosity of stately historical fountains such as the Trevi, Neptune, or Four Rivers. Ancient fountains were oftentimes dedicated to the gods; it can be said that this fountain is dedicated to the discarded, the dregs, the detritus. And yet, in these leftovers something shimmering, something conspiratorial, something kindred might be found. Something to hold on to. Something we ought not to lose.

Ω

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ana Harbec is a southern Alberta-based writer and editor. She is currently researching and writing about cowboys, masculinity, coal mining, the Devonian Period, and the role that bovines play in the history of human art and culture. Harbec is also working on a book of short stories tentatively titled Podunk. Her medium-term goals include being a contestant on Jeopardy! and competing in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.