Artworks by Artist
Undercurrents explores artistic responses to water, fish, and aquatic ecologies, where materiality, memory, myth, and metaphor converge. These works resonate through artists’ profoundly relational, reflexive, layered, and sometimes deeply personal engagements. Their invisible threads traverse stories of what endures after the turbulence of floods and hurricanes, in the ruins of industrial and racial capitalism, and amidst ongoing settler colonial erasure. Water remembers and connects across these lands and skies, bringing together the stal̕əw̓ (Fraser River, BC, Canada), the səl̓ilw̓ət (Burrard Inlet and Indian Arm, BC, Canada), the Gabekanaang-ziibi (Humber River, ON, Canada), the Chocolate River (Epetkutogoyek or Petitcodiac River, NB, Canada), Río Manatuabón (The Great Manatí River, Puerto Rico), Seekonk River (Providence, RI, USA), Ramallah’s remaining springs (Palestine), the coastal ecologies of the Bay of Fundy (Eastern Canada), Cape Cod (Northeastern United States), and the Gulf South (Southern United States), and the imagined water-worlds of plenitude and paucity rooted in African diasporic traditions. In these places and in spite of the violence and erasure, active presences of Indigenous peoples and rooted communities, salmon, shad, moonfish, birds, geckos, grass, cypress trees, molluscs, thistles, lichen, and other lives continue to resist and persist.
A flood is water’s way of teaching, remembering, disciplining, reclaiming authority, refusing containment, but also renewing relations with land and other beings. In Ancestral Ties to the Flood (2020), Manuel Axel Strain’s witnessing of floods that devastate First Nations reserves becomes a re-engagement with floods as a metaphor for Indigenous-led resistance, where their rising tides bring fertility back to the land. Strain’s mother’s singing as the voice of the river offers a reminder to recentre and restore kinship relations. Their what do you know? (2023) turns to poems and wisdom offered by Indigenous knowledge keepers. Carlie Trosclair’s drifter (2026) contemplates on longing and the shapeshifting of what lives on after cycles of floods and hurricanes. Drawing on Toni Morrison’s idea of flooding as water’s remembrance, her allowed our edges to merge (2024) imagines water as a force that recalls where it has been. Cypress trees become companions to this remembering, reaching towards former shorelines and once-submerged landscapes in the Gulf South, revealing memory and something not fixed in the past, but as a process of returning and ongoing relationship. Steve Maldonado Silvestrini’s ‘self-portrait’ of Río Manatuabón in Cuenca hidro-gráfica de Manatí / Manatí’s hydro-graphic basin (2022) offers a glimpse of Hurricane Maria’s flooding and renewed relations. After the water recedes, silt deposits and cracked earth transform into homes of small creatures while larger ones assert their territorial presence through footprints.
Fish may be one of water’s most exemplar students. In carrying out their responsibilities, fish too become remarkable teachers, inspirers, and providers. Brad Isaacs’ Salmon Grass (2018) brings attention to salmon’s teaching of embodied cyclical renewal through their annual migrations, connecting and bringing nutrients from the sea to enrich the land. In Untitled (2025), fish reveal their presence through found fishing lines. The embroidery work elicits questions about fishes’ continued presence as they confront plastic pollution and other impacts from urban development. Drawing on her Acadian heritage, Danielle Boudreau’s still-life painting of Chocolate River Shad (2026) explores ecological and cultural continuity through Shad fish as providers of sustenance for Acadian communities. In their mutual coexistence, relations of care emerge. Moonfish Meadow I and II (2023) by Matou contrasts African diasporic connections to landscape as a mode of self-realization and the anthropocentric mode of being. The Moonfish, both a symbol and a teacher, offers the choice of paucity or prosperity, inspiring renewed interspecies relations against the violence of climate change.
The weight of injustice echoes through the following works in deep resonance. Upon close listening, however, something or someone whispers back. Ahmed Alaqra’s I Have Been Speaking to the Water (2026) explores the hauntings of springs as they are being disappeared by Israeli occupation and settlements. Developed with water from Ramallah’s remaining springs, his analogue photographs embody the mineral record and water’s memory, the persistence of local ecologies and those that remain. The accompanying letter addressing the Guardian of the Spring meditates on the act of witnessing and what survives through myth and memory in the face of profound loss. In lullaby, for (2019/2021), James May experiments with the sonic relations between water collected from the Seekonk River and its pollutants. In a stark contrast to the lively ambient sounds of birds and passersby, the emergent feedback loop asks for a constant renewal of attention and reimagined relations with water bodies. As if resounding back, the poetic sound work of səl̓ilw̓ət – Mother Inlet (2026) by Pari Mokradi attends to water’s powers to hold and heal, flowing, cleansing, washing away rage, grief, and weariness. In FIRE AND WATER (undated), Pari honours their ancestral teaching and responds to the səl̓ilw̓ət in gratitude as the waters offer temporary relief from the heaviness of their witnessing.
Presence gives and receives in reciprocal relations. Non-linearly and fluidly, these works continue their expansive dialogues beyond our textual expressions. We invite you into relation-building with them.
With Gratitude,
Rapichan Phurisamban, Courtney Chetwynd, and Zoe Todd
Co-curators
We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for making this exhibit possible through the Connection Grants program.
Copyrights notice:
These works are protected under Canadian and international copyright law and may not be downloaded, reproduced, distributed, or otherwise used without the express written consent of the Artist. The Artist possesses the exclusive right to produce, reproduce, publish, perform, exhibit, transmit or retransmit the work by telecommunication, create derivative works, sell, rent, offer for sale or rent, exhibit by way of trade, or distribute the work in whole or in part. It is unlawful to exercise any of the above rights or to alter or modify the work without the prior written consent of the Artist. Anyone violating the Artist’s rights may be subject to legal action or criminal prosecution.