Mixed media installation by Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Ingrid Mayrhofer with contributions from Neri Espinoza and Miguel Lima
May 12 – August 5, 2023
Everything Comes Together at the Table is based on Red Tree Artists’ Collective’s “kitchen table” activism that led to our support and participation in actions and campaigns launched by the Committee for the Detained/Disappeared in Guatemala (CDGUA) throughout the eighties and nineties.
The table displays printed material–created with cut-and-pasted drawings, photographs, found images, typed and Letraset text–along with contemporary digital media campaigns. Archival documents are displayed under glass. On the laptop, a jam board workshop invites viewers to construct their own texts and images of solidarity. The painted table runner and hand-built clay dishes underpin the historical continuum of community engagement and supportive social interaction.
We thank Dr. Liisa North at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) and Caese Levo at LAWG (Latin America Working Group) for taking care of the CDGUA archive.
For access to the accompanying digital workshop please email <redtree@sympatico.ca> subject: Jamboard
or visit https://wahc-museum.ca/event/everything-comes-together-at-the-table/
The installation is part of the Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts exhibition at the Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton
Infrastructures of Dissent
featuring work by Tings Chak 翟庭君, Hannia Cheng, Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Ingrid Mayrhofer, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh and Anthony Youssef with Alan Sears, curated by Mitra Fakhrashrafi and Tara Bursey.
In 1945, Ford auto workers in Windsor went on a 99-day strike and won. Leading up to this historic win, workers and their families gathered in the nearby restaurants and cultural centres of Drouillard Road to learn, to dance, and to act. In his writing on the infrastructure of dissent, sociologist Alan Sears suggests it is these forged networks of solidarity and celebration that nurtured the militancy of the strikers.
Infrastructures of Dissent pays tribute to the parks, restaurants, kitchen tables, shisha lounges and cafés, clubs, sanctuaries and union halls that have seeded both the formal organizing efforts and the informal knowledge exchanges that lead to collective action. Across geographies and against all odds, we ask: what ways can we rebuild infrastructures of dissent and foster community power?
ingrid mayrhofer 