I WILL RELATE TO YOU

APRIL 25 - SEPTEMBER 23, 2024, FENTSTER Gallery, 402 College Street, Toronto, Ontario

I WILL RELATE TO YOU, APRIL 25 - SEPTEMBER 23, 2024, OPENING SIDEWALK PARTY | JUNE 23 | 3 - 5 PM

FENTSTER Gallery and The Ontario Jewish Archives have partnered to present an installation derived from my research and my family’s story about their lives in the north and how they supported themselves through their work and community. 

With the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, I spent the last few years deeply entrenched in the journals of my Bubbie where she tells and retells my family history in a very lively and conversational style. She passed when I was 12, and both her absence and presence have marked my life.  She writes about her childhood in Cochrane, Ontario and, along the way, accounts bleed in from what her own Bubbie told her and her mother and aunt about the establishment of the Jewish communities in northern Ontario. These stories catalyzed me to seek out others to try to fill in a broader understanding and narrative of the ‘north’. 

I embarked on meeting with former residents and their descendants to learn about what they remembered and what associations they had to the Jewish- Canadian north. I spent time up north, at the Northern Hebrew Chevra Kadisha (the only active space of this Jewish history). I also spent time in the Ontario Jewish Archives where I could connect with images of my family I had not seen prior.

For this installation I have centralised the work on my family store and by extension the other Jewish stores of the north. The first family store, which grew into Perkus Limited, began out of necessity - a recent widow around my current age (my great-great-grandmother) to provide for her family and community, and with provisional materials to make this happen. This work brings together a constellation of borrowed objects, images, metaphors, and members of my own local Jewish community to relate this history, and by extension undertold migrant histories. 

Presented by FENTSTER and the Ontario Jewish Archives with the support of the Kultura Collective

Curatorial team | Donna Bernardo-Ceriz, Na'ama Freeman, Evelyn Tauben

Installation | Paul Boddum, Sal Lovink McKinnell, David Waldman

Embroidery team | Sam Mogelonsky, Hanna Schacter, Noah Gano, Ellen Bleiwas, Na'ama Freeman, Rachel Miller and Meichen Waxer

Acknowledgements

FENTSTER thanks Nick Blais and Erika Pulfer for their invaluable consultations on the exhibition.

The artist would like to thank her bubbie, Jessie as well as all the former residents of Kirkland Lake and their descendants who she has interviewed as part of a larger research project funded by the Canada Council for the Arts: Peter Waxer, Stephen Aidelbaum, Belle Kizell, Marc Gurevitch, Henry Abramson, Aliza Sanchez, Raphaela Abramson, Boaz Abramson, Aryeh Abramson, Ethel Abramson, Sol Mednick, Helen Winkler, Ann Leibovitch, Harvey Korman, Esther Verred, Isaac Katz, and Morris Langer. Others who made this journey possible and added love and care: Roxanne Luchak, Jon McCurley, Tanis Fink, Derek Liddington, Katherine Waxer, Orly Zebak and Howard Kizell.

Installation photos: Brittany Carmichael