As part of Sovereign Intimacies:
Stitch-Kin | An Evening of Poetry with Poet, Filmmaker, and Textile Artist melannie monoceros
Thursday, November 26, 2020 | 6 pm CT
Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art | 1, 460 Portage Ave | Winnipeg MB | Canada
Tune in on November 26, 2020 at 6 pm CT for Stitch-Kin, an evening of poetry with poet, filmmaker, and textile artist melannie monoceros. During this evening reading with melannie monoceros, the poet will share and read from their suite of recent and older poems exploring ancestors, threadlove and lore, queer kinship, and grief. Afterward melannie will answer questions and invite a brief conversation with curators and audience. This event is presented as part of Sovereign Intimacies in partnership with Gallery 1C03, with support from Video Pool Media Arts Centre.
Following Stitch-Kin monoceros will also be presenting Whispers in the Weft a virtual artist talk hosted by the Manitoba Craft Council. Tune in for this talk at 7:30pm CT on Thursday, November 26th!
Informed by an intentionally multi- and inter-disciplinary artistic practice, melannie monoceros will stitch parallels between the work of weaving and that of memoir writing. Approaches to narrative, can, as melannie will share, be influenced by the choreography of weaving: the let off, the take up, the chain, the choke, the cross.
Offering insight into their exploration of grief and the body, melannie will bring together practices of mending, (re)collecting and creating to consider the lessons wrought through the kinship of text/iles.
melannie monoceros is a poet and interdisciplinary artist exploring polysensory production and somatic grief through text/ile. Their work considers the collective qrip (queer+crip) consciousness by connecting to marvelous bodies living with complexity as sick or disabled. A Black, Taino, Arawak creator, they live in Treaty 1/Winnipeg, MB; home of the Métis First Nation and the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Dene, Cree, Dakota and Oji-Cree Nations. In 2019, melannie was awarded the JRG Emerging Artist Award for their continued pursuit, integrating technology and accessibility through film via their series “ancestoradio”. In 2020 melannie’s work can be found at Gallery 1C03 (University of Winnipeg) the Window Gallery (Winnipeg) and the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba (Brandon, MB).
Sovereign Intimacies is a group exhibition co-curated by Nasrin Himada and Jennifer Smith, in partnership with Gallery 1C03, with support from Video Pool Media Arts Centre. The exhibition takes place at Plug In ICA from September 26 – December 20, 2020, with extensive programming that consists of online talks, workshops, screenings, and poetry readings. Sovereign Intimacies explores themes of cultural and community exchange between Indigenous artists and artists from the diaspora, more specifically artists who are First Nations, Inuit and Métis collaborating with artists living in what is currently called Canada who came to this land and are not part of the settler/colonial history of the country. The group show consists of pairings of artists, as well as individuals, whose work is based on process and relationship building, and for those whose work is invested in active conceptualization around topics of friendship and intimacy, who are working to build collective vision of a sovereign future.