REBECCA ANWEILER

Reflections, 2022-2024

In July of 2019 I attended an artist residency on Earth-based spirituality at Artscape Gibraltar Point on Centre Island in Toronto. I was seeking a community and reflective time for developing my practice as an artist working with themes related to  interspecies communication that came out of my 2017 exhibition in the State of Flux gallery at Modern Fuel: Animal/Séance. The residency followed massive flooding on Lake Ontario after record above-average rainfalls and the waters had finally receded enough to allow the use of the old, converted schoolhouse for the summer season. Still, pumps were going constantly on Centre Island, homes were barely out of the water, and many walkways were still submerged. My studio windows faced the Island Water Treatment Plant with the waters of Lighthouse Pond reaching up to that building and mine.  

On my first day at Artscape, to the shock of close friends, family, and the arts community in Toronto and beyond, I learned that Katherine Mulherin, a beloved artist, gallerist and curator, took her own life. Katherine and I were not close, but we went to art school together and she was one of the first gallery dealers to exhibit my work. A warm and gentle-hearted soul with a quirky sense of humour, she had been a risk-taker and a name-maker.  In the late 90’s she opened up the very rough West Queen Street West to the Toronto gallery scene for emerging artists like me, living in not much more than a closet with her young son to make space in her home for our art. 

I couldn’t sleep that night. I drank too much wine, wandered the empty halls of the old schoolhouse and ended up in my studio where I danced in the dark looking at those watery reflections outside my window. I took bad photos, smoked a few cigarettes on the back stoop amongst the drowned debris of sandbags, barriers and orange cones, and felt the world was way smaller than before Katherine left us. 

During the rest of the residency, I created a series of small studies from the blurry photos I’d taken of the watery world outside my studio that night, laying the acrylic paint down and wiping it off quickly to mostly erase what hadn’t set, and to leave just a stain behind. Like the traumas of life, the marks that go down first remained the strongest. Even doing our best, we can’t always manage to heal the pain that we carry for ourselves or others.