Origin Story

Curated by Ash Barbu at Karsh-Masson Gallery

Aylin Abassi and Ash Barbu, Self-Portrait as Them, 2024, chromogenic print on paper, 71 x 102 cm, courtesy of the artists

Origin Story
Aylin Abbasi, Ash Barbu, Nic Cooper, Theo J. Cuthand, Kama La Mackerel and Cara Tierney

Curator: Ash Barbu

August 1 – October 27, 2024
Vernissage: Thursday, August 1, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Artists’ Tour & Performance: Sunday, September 22, 2 pm
Karsh-Masson Gallery, Ottawa City Hall

Origin Story explores the question of narrative agency within the context of trans storytelling. Aylin Abbasi, Ash Barbu, Nic Cooper, Theo J. Cuthand, Kama La Mackerel, and Cara Tierney gather from unresolved pasts and think through shared futures. Together, they engage with intersecting histories of trans care, queer activism, and Indigenous worldmaking to illustrate other models of inheritance and (un)becoming.

Cara Tierney, Back and Forth, 2011, chromogenic print on paper, 81 x 102 cm, courtesy of the artist

Biographies

Aylin Abbasi is an Iranian interdisciplinary feminist artist whose practice explores oppression in her social and political life experiences. In May 2024, Abbasi received her MFA from the University of Ottawa. She was the art director at “Tajrobeh Design Studio” in Tehran and an official member of Tehran’s Motion Graphics Designers Association. In her work, Abbasi highlights practices of being multiple as she learns who she is and what has changed in her new North American context.

Ash Barbu is an artist, curator, and educator whose work examines the relationship between trans autobiography, queer theory, and curatorial studies. They hold an M.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto. Recently, they were the Guest Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Visual Arts and a Research Fellow at Visual AIDS, New York. In November 2023, Barbu and Aylin Abbasi presented their first collaborative film Mother Ladder Night at the DARC Microcinema, Ottawa.

Nic Cooper’s work is concerned with cultural memory and visual histories, reflecting their queer, non-binary and Croatian-Polish identity. Using historical and current images, their recent work investigates public actions across disparate times and locations, connecting the power of community gathering. Cooper received their MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Ottawa in 2020, published their writing in Drain Magazine’s issue Queerfacture, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions. Their work is featured on book covers published by Routledge and Oxford University Press, and they have participated in artist residencies in Israel-Palestine, Nicaragua and Canada.

Since 1995, Theo Jean Cuthand has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally. His work has been exhibited at galleries including the Remai Modern, National Gallery of Canada, Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and Walker Art Centre. He is a trans man who uses he/him pronouns. He is of Plains Cree and Scots descent and a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.

Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator, and literary translator who believes in love, justice, and self and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the lines between traditional artistic disciplines to create hybrid aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. At once narratological and theoretical, personal and political, their interdisciplinary method, developed over the past decade, is grounded in ritual, meditation, ancestral healing modalities, auto-ethnography, oral history, archival research and community-arts facilitation.

Raised in Tiotenactokte/Skanawetsy/Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, QC, Cara Tierney is a Scottish-Irish-Italian white settler trans* creative whose work sits at the intersection of art, education, and collective liberation. Over the last 20 years, they have delivered and designed both arts, and arts-based conscientization workshops on unceded Algonquin land, in and around so-called Ottawa. Tierney approaches their work as an endless series of opportunities to learn, bridge creativity, communities, and share knowledge in the service of social transformation.