CUAG has developed an audio description tour for "Drawing on Our History," designed for gallery visitors who are blind or who have low vision. It is intended for in-gallery use, but can also be used remotely.

"Drawing on Our History" is a celebration of CUAG’s 30th anniversary, bringing the works of eight contemporary artists (invited by past guest curators) into an open conversation with a wide-ranging group of historical and contemporary drawings selected from the University’s collection and made by Canadian and international artists.

The tour provides an overall description of the exhibition, and descriptions of ten works from the CUAG collection, including the newest acquisition, “Medusa” by Ed Pien. It also features descriptions and interviews with three of the invited contemporary artists: Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona, Mélanie Meyers and Marigold Santos.

In gallery, there are tactile reproductions of several art works, and a tactile path for independent navigation.

This tour was produced by CUAG, and designed with insights from members of Ottawa and Carleton’s blind and low vision community.

This audio description tour was written by Fiona Wright and recorded and edited by Nicole Bedford. Thank you to Rich Hillborn and Ludmilla Dubuisson for being the voices of the descriptions, and to artists Melanie Myers, Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona and Marigold Santos for their input. 

Thank you to the members of Ottawa’s blind and low vision community who consulted on this tour in the early stages, as well as Carla Ayukawa. Thank you to Walter Zanetti for making the floor tracks and to Patrick Lacasse, who installed them. 

Thank you to the curatorial team: Heather Igloliorte, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Anna Khimasia, Alexandra Kahsenni:io Nahwegahbow, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Danielle Printup, Heather Anderson and Sandra Dyck. Artworks were generously loaned by the artists, private collectors, TD Bank Corporate Art Collection, Patel Brown, Cooper Cole, Norberg Hall and The Next Contemporary.

The exhibition is supported by The Joe Friday and Grant Jameson Contemporary Art Fund, The Reesa Greenberg Digital Initiatives Fund and The Mame Jackson Experiential Learning Fund.

This chapter describes a pastel on paper drawing titled Aujourd’hui l’echo de l’orage resonne by Rita Letendre, created in 1982, and measuring 47 by 67 cm. It is one and a half minutes long. 

Can you feel a storm after it passes? Maybe in the smell of the air, or the temperature change. In Aujourd’hui l’echo de l’orage resonne, or “today the echo of the storm resounds,” Rita Letendre focuses on sounds and reverberations. She has used pastel, a chalky pigmented material, to create an abstract composition of horizontal bands of vivid colour, blurring or almost vibrating as they transition upwards from rich blue to yellow to pale green to orange to red to black to blue and then back to red. Is her inspiration the sky after a storm, or is it the artist reflecting on the aftereffects of a more personal, emotional storm? As she has written, “My paintings are completely emotional, full of hair-trigger intensity. Through them, I challenge space and time. I paint freedom, escape from the here and now, from the mundane…The world isn’t only what we see or what we experience.” 

What are the textures or colours you attribute to emotions, both intense and tranquil? 

You’re done the tour now! Turn right and follow the path to the bottom of the stairs, where you began. Thank you for joining us.

This chapter is the text written by curator Alice Ming Wai Jim. It is two minutes long. 

Alice writes:

Marigolds thrive in the arid climates of Marigold Santos’s desert landscape paintings, one of which appears in the background of her studio depicted in the ink drawing shroud (arid interior I). The scene also affords us a glimpse of the artist’s take on the asuang (aswang), a traditionally terrifying shapeshifting creature of Filipino folklore.

Multiple configurations of this powerful, amorphous being populate Santos’s drawings and ceramics. Her reimagined asuang figures appear in numerous poses and positions — their shrouds at times made of thick dark masses, mystical woven textiles or braided voluminous hair, or exchanged for largebrimmed
veiled hats of different styles.

The asuang mythology arose from the Babaylan — pillars of society as shamans and healers in pre-colonial Philippines — whose meaning and purpose were inverted by the Spanish colonizers. Reconfigured again, Santos’s asuang figure is hybrid in state and status, negotiating strata and longing, becoming land; these are not uncommon preoccupations today, during eras of migration and diaspora.

The blemishes or ink spots, or perhaps striae or scars, all over their bodies are more than skin deep. They tell stories, the narratives that make a life legible to oneself and to others. A form of permanent body adornment, tattooing was a prevalent cultural practice passed down in all ethnic groups of the Philippine Islands before they were colonized in the sixteenth century.

Super enlarged tattoo motifs of the artist’s design monumentalize this living art form as a cutaneous archive of ancestral knowledge that Filipinos are reviving today as a vibrant, decolonial practice.

Please move to the next stop. Turn right and follow the path for 4 metres. Then turn right and continue for 7 and a half metres. The drawing is on your left. This is the last stop of the tour.

This chapter features an interview with artist Marigold Santos. It is two and a half minutes long.

Hi Marigold, what is the inspiration or story behind your work in Drawing on Our History?

The works in this exhibition come from various moments in my practice from the last 5 years or so. They range in material and application, from works on paper to ceramics, paintings, and includes my tattoo practice, which is another form of mark making and drawing for me. This particular collection of works reflect on, and speak of, the body, embodiment of experience, self-hood, empowerment, and diaspora. The imagery consists of figures reconfigured from folklore, objects pulled from sensorial memories like touch, taste, and smell, and textures and patterns that come from my heritage and the landscape of my childhood. 

Why do you choose to use Tagalog in some of the titles of your work?

My family immigrated to Canada in the late 80’s and I was just a child. I spoke Tagalog and did not understand English. We learned how to speak English very quickly, but my siblings and I stopped speaking our mother tongue in and outside of the home from that point on. Even though I can understand it quite fluently, I have difficulty in speaking it. Titling my work in Tagalog is a way for me to return to and honor my mother tongue in fragments. It is also a way for my work to reach folks who do understand Tagalog, and to create entry points into the work for them. 

Why are you drawn towards being an artist?

Making art for me, has always been about communicating something – whether it is communicating something I am curious about, asking questions of, researching, or experimenting with, communicating is the undercurrent for me. I communicate through my work, and I think through my work. I also transform and evolve as a person through my work. My art practice is a way for me to continue to critically ask questions and make joy. 

Go to the next chapter to hear the curatorial label for Santos’s work. 

This chapter describes the ink drawing shroud (buntis na erotica) 1, made in 2021 and measuring 33 x 25 cm. long. It is a minute and a half long.

Two female figures dance together, each draped in a delicate, transparent cloth, or shroud. Their bodies mirror each other: the back of one hand is posed on one hip and the other hand is raised in the hair, bringing the shroud up along with it. They each step one foot towards each other, bringing them closer, almost intimately, together. Though the different elements of their bodies: breasts, swollen bellies and arms, are visible, their faces remain completely obscured by the shroud and by the splotches of ink that dot their whole bodies. The use of the veil teases us by hiding and revealing the dancers’ bodies, perhaps apt as the title of the artwork “buntis na erotica” means “pregnant erotica” in Tagalog. With no background, the attention is focused wholly on these women’s gestures and powerful bodies. 

Go to the next chapter to hear Santos talk about her artwork.

This chapter describes flower abstraction (elongated) 1, 2, 3 by Marigold Santos, made in 2022 and measuring four metres high. There is a tactile version of this drawing. It is labeled “6.” This chapter is a minute and half long.

In this artwork, Marigold created an enlarged vinyl version of a black drawing of three imagined flowers. They snake up the wall of the gallery vertically, reaching the level of the balcony above. In the tactile version of this drawing, you can feel the stems, petals and leaves. Each flower has at least three distinct parts, bottom, middle and top, and the stems zig zag in different sections, before separating off into small blooms of various shapes and sizes.  The designs have very bold linework and are very stylized. The flowers appear to be surreal or otherworldly.

Santos is also a tattoo artist, and these black graphics recall a flash sheet, which tattoo artists use to display pre-designed creations. There are four flash sheets in this installation by Santos, and they are ink drawings on paper. They have multiple designs composed on one sheet.  Which flowers do you think inspired this design? Though they are rendered in black, can you imagine them with colours? Can you imagine these designs tattooed on skin? What is the relationship between the large flower designs and the smaller flash drawings?

Go to the next chapter to hear about another work by Santos, hung on the wall to your left.

Marigold Santos is a Filipino-Canadian artist based in Calgary, and was invited to be part of the exhibition by Alice Ming Wai Jim, a curator and art historian at Concordia University in Montreal. You can hear her written reflection on Marigold’s artwork in Chapter 36. This chapter will give an overall description of Marigold’s installation, and the next two chapters will describe specific works within the installation. Then you’ll hear from Marigold herself. This chapter is a minute long.

Marigold’s installation is in a corner of the High Gallery, close to one of the gallery’s exits. The ceilings here are 6 metres high and you might hear visitors on the floor above, as the balcony stretches out into the space above you.

The largest part of this installation is a black floral design made of vinyl and applied directly to the gallery wall, 4 metres high. It is 4 and a half metres in front of you. There are also nine other works hung on the wall, some quite dark that were drawn in charcoal and pastel on paper, and others done with ink on paper.  There is also one painting on canvas, as well as four tall square display cases with seven small ceramic pieces.

Go to the next chapter for information on Santos’s individual works.

This chapter is the text written by Mckenzie Holbrook for Glade and House. It is a minute long.

With its rhythmic brushstrokes and monumental trees, Glade and House demonstrates Emily Carr’s loose, expressive approach to painting on paper, in keeping with the large scale of the environment on British Columbia’s West Coast. The warm ochre tones suggest late summer or early autumn, painted with oil paints thinned with gasoline, which Carr valued for its economy and portability when working outside. Carr’s sweeping brush strokes emphasize the majestic trees, while the stumps in the foreground that line the path to the house at the centre of the composition, remind us of the giants that have been felled.

Please move to the next stop. Turn to the right and continue along this wall for 5 and a half metres.

This chapter describes Glade and House by Emily Carr, created in 1945, and measuring 89 by 61 cm. It is a minute long. 

In this scene, tall trees dwarf a simple box cabin, built on the edge of a cleared section of the forest. The clearing, or glade, has been painted in muddy yellows, and is dotted with short black tree trunks. At this time, Carr, the renowned West Coast painter, used a thinned oil paint that had a consistency of cream. The brown paper underneath peaks out between the softly arched brushstrokes of varied greens she has used to depict the branches of the trees or the blue of the sky. These expressive gestures attempt to capture the aliveness of this scene, though it seems a stark commentary on human impact on the land. Though the cabin, and its invisible owner inside, seems enveloped by the trees, who knows how long it will be before they become stumps? What future is the owner of the cabin pondering as they stand looking out of those two tiny windows, taking in the smells of the air and trees all around them. 

To hear more about this work, play the next track. Or move to the next stop. Turn to the right and continue along this wall for 5 and a half metres.