Tara Bursey

February 23rd - April 6th, 2024

At Centre[3] for Artistic and Social Practice, Hamilton, Ontario.

For Cuts and Lock Ups, I collected printed and photo-based work created as an Artist-in-Residence at both Mount Allison University (Sackville, NB) and Centre[3], generated through the process of teaching myself to hand-set type on a Vandercook press. 

Through typesetting, I investigated my familial history of work, class identity, and the trajectory of print industries over time, including the deep history of unionized labour and resistance in the printing trades.

In the 19th century, typesetting was the domain of a skilled, powerful workforce organized under one of the oldest unions in history, the International Typographical Union. Over the second half of the 20th century, this union navigated and ultimately succumbed to the complexities of technological change—from the adoption of Linotype technology, to desktop publishing.

Harnessing the vestiges of wood type and letterpress, I attempted to reclaim the radical history of the printing press to highlight the struggles of workers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic during the so-called “Great Resignation.” Diverse printed works drew from the material culture of the labour movement, archival materials, and messaging about contemporary work collected from friends and colleagues obscured through layering, cutting, and abstraction. Included in the exhibition is the photo series Lock Ups, highlighting typesetting processes of “locking up” and “makeready” (in other words, the work of preparing to print) as subject matter. These photos privilege abstraction, preparation, and process over product while symbolizing an absence of productivity and withholding one’s labour— long an assertion of worker power, past and present. 

Cuts and Lock Ups highlights a years-long process-based print practice that highlights the physical evidence of individual labour, honours the hidden histories of the labour movement, and the thoughts and fears of working people today.

May 12 - July 29, 2023

An exhibition featuring Tings Chak, Hannia Cheng, Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Ingrid Mayrhofer (Red Tree Collective), Rana Nazzal Hamadeh and Anthony Youssef with Alan Sears.

Curated by Tara Bursey and Mitra Fakhrashrafi.

Presented as part of the Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre.

In 1945, Ford autoworkers in Windsor went on a 99-day strike and won. Leading up to this historic win, workers and their families gathered in the nearby restaurants and cultural centres of Drouillard Road to learn, to dance, and to act. In his writing on the infrastructure of dissent, sociologist Alan Sears suggests it is these forged networks of solidarity and celebration that nurtured the militancy of the strikers.

Infrastructures of Dissent pays tribute to the parks, restaurants, kitchen tables, shisha lounges and cafés, clubs, sanctuaries and union halls that have seeded both the formal organizing efforts and the informal knowledge exchanges that lead to collective action. Across geographies and against all odds, we ask: what ways can we rebuild infrastructures of dissent and foster community power?

View Infrastructures of Dissent‘s accompanying booklet, Histories Erosions and Futures, and audio recording with an interview of Alan Sears by Anthony Youssef here.

View the interpretive Guide for All Ages created to accompany Infrastructures of Dissent here.

May 1 - 13, 2022

The Art and Labour Lab is an ongoing project, launched on May Day of 2022 as part of Living Is Easy at Struts Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick.

Drawing from the aesthetics of 20th century job centres, the first iteration of the Art and Labour Lab was a participatory research project that explored and archived intersections of art, cultural work, and labour organizing. Over two weeks, visitors added to a growing collection of resources displayed and distributed at Struts Gallery during “office hours.” A publication grew out of conversations and resources gathered during the Lab’s tenure at Struts, with a contribution from the New Brunswick Common Front For Social Justice (Moncton). These publications were made primarily to be distributed to Mount Allison University students on campus to aid in their own understanding community organizing and labour issues for artists and arts workers.

Click here to view a digital version of the Art and Labour Lab zine.

Want to get involved with future iterations of this project? Want to host the Art and Labour Lab in your space? Get in touch through the contact page.

Learn! Create! Share! Organize!

March 12 - April 10, 2022

Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick

Owens Free Space is an unfolding community resource and creative production space. Inspired by my work as a teen in late 1990s Toronto in and around infoshops—non-hierarchical, informal centres for activism, art, punk, information exchange, and anarchist praxis found around the world—Owens Free Space draws from their ethics and culture to create an alternative, open site of learning and making.

Students and the public have access to a zine library of nearly 450 zines, adhesive vinyl for hand cutting, a photocopier for zine making, and a record collection to play. Visitors are encouraged to create a zine to provoke and inform and leave something behind for someone else to explore.

On March 21st, 2022, I facilitated a Plotter Jam— a vinyl graphics workshop where students and the public created a collaborative mural in the space. This event and the greater project was programmed alongside the exhibition The Baroness Elsa Project, and linked the history and spirit of Dada with contemporary self-publishing and movement-building.

This space was developed within the context of my role as 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Lassonde School of Fine Arts, Mount Allison University in collaboration with Lucy MacDonald, Curator of Education and Community Outreach, Rachel Thornton, Curator of Digital Engagement, and fine arts students Daisy Graham, Chloe Lundrigan, Kaya Panthier, and Shivanya Ra.

An interpretive video about the Owens Free Space, and my role and inspiration in shaping the space, can be found here, on the OwensTV Vimeo channel.

Photos: Rachel Thornton

July 30-September 27, 2021

At Hamilton Artists Inc.

New New Deal is a window installation that plays with commercial applications of graphic design and type. As part of a two generation sign-making family, my interest in signs questions how the capitalist logic of so many signs in the public realm might be flipped to serve radical or anti-capitalist aims while maintaining their ability to inform, provoke, or serve as a call to action. This installation connects the history and trajectory of signs in urban space with the language of social reform—specifically the New Deal, an American post-Depression plan for economic recovery being revived today—to draw attention to the power and potential of post-pandemic mobilization.

Production and Installation Assistance: Gorilla Graphics

Project Coordination: Abedar Kamgari and John Hill, Hamilton Artists Inc.

This work is presented as part of Hamilton Artists Inc.’s special projects stream, implemented by the NEW Committee. These projects include one-off performances, zines, posters, screenings, workshops, community events, digital platforms, outdoor projects, site-specific interventions, off-site projects, or other similarly unique initiatives.

March - August 2021

It was both a huge honour and profound challenge to bring the work of my colleague, St. John’s-based artist Larry Weyand to Burlington for a solo show at the Art Gallery of Burlington in the middle of Ontario’s second lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This body of work, Peeling the Sticker Off an Overripe Pear, connects the material histories of Newfoundland and New England with Larry’s family history. This powerful, generous work combining autoethnography and craft uses 2D and 3D rug hooking to accessibly address trauma, gender identity, addiction and mental health to diverse audiences.

What set this exhibition apart from previous showings of this body of work was the exhibition’s educational focus. A 12-page Guide for All Ages was created to unpack the exhibition’s themes and ideas for families. A five-week virtual program of maritime-style “Hook-Ins” via Zoom allowed youth from Halton organizations Reach Out Centre for Kids and the Positive Space Network (PSN) to create and find community during a time of separation. The work that grew out of this program appeared alongside Larry’s work in the exhibition for the last month of the exhibition’s run.

This project was developed within the context of my position as Associate Educator at the Art Gallery of Burlington. Many thanks to Suzanne Carte, Senior Curator of the AGB for supporting this exhibition.

Photography: Kat Williams

2019-2020

Punk City is a quarterly event series highlighting intersections of punk, identity, politics, local history, and more, produced as a collaboration between myself, Craig Caron (Hammer City Records) and artist Sid Drmay. Events run over a weekend, and have included walking tours, youth workshops, exhibitions and concerts.

Our inaugural event in October 2019 celebrated Hamilton’s local punk heritage. We hosted a exhibition of local punk ephemera from the 70s to the present at Hammer City Records, and two Hamilton Punk History Walking Tours designed and led by Chris Houston (solo artist and former member of the Forgotten Rebels) along with a number of special guests from Hamilton’s original 70s punk scene. A limited edition map designed by Dave Kuruc and printed by Hidden Quality was produced for the occasion.

In January of 2020, we created a program that showed how gender diversity, ethnicity, indigeneity and lived experiences manifest within punk and make it stronger and more nuanced. This program included a talk about Punk in Yugoslavia by Berislav Sabolić, an exhibition by Una Di Gallo, a beading workshop delivered by Six Nations artist and craftsperson Dani Valentine, a concert, and Rainbow Punx, a workshop for youth led by LGBTQ2S+ and non-binary punk mentors Evelyn Charlotte Joe, Phoibe Underhill and Rosa (Easily Discouraged).

This series is supported entirely by donations and fundraiser events. Thanks to everyone who has supported Punk City in ways large and small over the last year. COVID-19 has disrupted our third weekend in May, but we look forward to planning future events soon.

Presentation and workshop at A Handmade Assembly, Owens Art Gallery/Mount Allison University and Struts Gallery, Sackville, NB.

November 20-23, 2019

The structure and strength of textile has long been seen as a metaphor for community and care. This idea was central to the exhibition All or None at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre (2017), which explored the iconography and production of a selection of banners from their permanent collection as vehicles of communication, celebration, affiliation, and resistance.

The talk highlighted the histories, stories and research underpinning this exhibition of banners from garment workers’ union locals in Canada, and the labour unions and workers– primarily immigrant women– who decades ago fueled garment manufacturing in Canada and beyond. It pointed to how the legacy of early 20th century labour banners can be found in the works of contemporary artists (Kandis Friesen, Dylan Miner) and activists today, and how the banners have served as inspiration within the context of contemporary museum programming for youth, and adults.

As part of the conference, I facilitated a banner making workshop. Participants drew from the spirit and symbols of social and labour movements to create their own banners using appliqué, iron-on transfer, painting and notions. Text, image, embellishment and colour were employed to create a series of diverse banners exploring identity, ability and acceptance.

View a complete video of the presentation here, courtesy of the Owens Art Gallery.

A transcript of the presentation can be found here.

Reflecting on the social, economic and political conditions of the present, this project plays with design and type to communicate naked truths, ranging in tone from funny to angry to bittersweet. This installation is an an attempt at capturing some of the insecurity people of my generation and younger face today, using text to create individual statements and collective cacophony.

Endless thank you’s to Ben Needham of Gorilla Graphics for his assistance fabricating this installation.

Exhibition History:

September 2019 | Hammer City Records, Hamilton

November 2019 | The Assembly, Hamilton

June 21 - November 10, 2019

Curatorial project featuring the work of the Centre[3] Zine Club (Hamilton), Billy Mavreas (Montreal) and Fiona Smyth (Toronto) at Art Gallery of Hamilton. This project was completed during, and as part of my one-year tenure as Manager, Education at the AGH.

A zine (pronounced /zeen/) is a humble self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, usually reproduced with a photocopier. With roots in self-published civil war pamphlets and science fiction fan magazines of the 1930s, zines embody a DIY approach to publishing that is scrappy, hands-on, and inherently democratic.

Part exhibition, part workshop and part residency, My Back Pages: The Art of Zines and Indie Publishing provided space for the public to learn about zine culture and try their hand at creating a zine of their own. The space housed a residency where emerging and veteran “zinesters” created site-specific work while showcasing their own self-published zines and artwork in the related areas of drawing, printmaking, assemblage and comics. With the help of a series of community partners, this space will housed programming that positioned zines and indie publishing within the context of today’s social, cultural, and political landscape.

This exhibition and program accompanied This is Serious, a major survey of Canadian indie comic artists at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

Many thanks to Tor Lukasik-Foss and Tobi Bruce for their encouragement and support of this exhibition.

Some great coverage of My Back Pages can be found on Broken Pencil’s blog here.

2018

Curatorial project featuring the work of Dave Kuruc at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre, Hamilton

Jobbers. Exports. Hamilton’s wrestling “factory.” The language of work and the language of wrestling share a similar vocabulary that help situate it as a favourite spectacle of working class folks in post-industrial cities (and beyond). Whether you love it or hate it, wrestling—both amateur and the world of professional wrestling popularized by the WWE— demands strength, skill, cooperation and theatricality of its talent. While people question whether or not wrestling is “real,” the perils of a career as a wrestler are substantial. Stories from wrestling’s past and present echo those in industrial workplaces, from union drives among pro wrestlers and camaraderie, to the chronic pain associated with exposure to punishing working conditions.

Punching the Clock, an exhibition of design and research by graphic artist Dave Kuruc, presents the faces, places and names of Hamilton’s amateur wrestling scene against a backdrop of Hamilton’s downtown and east end industrial neighbourhoods in the mid-20th century. The stories of the wrestlers represented illustrate how wrestling weaved a community together around common experiences of labour and leisure. The working lives of the people behind the pomp of their characters show the creativity and resilience of everyday people working for a living in a changing city.

A love letter to Hamilton’s past and present, this exhibition positions wrestling as equal parts art, work and sport — a true worker’s art form.

This exhibition and program was accompanied by an exhibition essay by Anthony Easton. Programs presented alongside this exhibition included a wrestling and labour history tour of Hamilton’s east end, and a wrestling match featuring talent from Alpha-1 Wrestling.

Punching the Clock was supported by funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Arts Education 2017 - 18

Working as a member of Red Tree Collective, I coordinated a program where artists designed and delivered 36 arts workshops for children and adult caregivers in the classroom. Working alongside partners from Prince of Wales Elementary School (a public school in working-class East Hamilton) and the school’s Home and School Association, these workshops used culturally-specific art forms to increase student self-esteem, improve access to the arts, and integrate parents into the culture of the school.

A full year of workshops grew out of a pilot project I delivered in consultation with Adam Farr (POW Learning Resources Teacher) and Sandra Huculiak (President of the POW Home and School Association) in the winter and spring of 2017. Workshops delivered during the 2017/18 school year included shibori dyeing, map making, mail art, dub poetry, relief printing, blues music, clay vessels inspired by the Mohawk clan system, and more. Participating artists included Ingrid Mayrhofer, Klyde Broox, Matt McInnes, Hitoko Okada, Treasa Levasseur, Judi Henhawk Sault, Leah Klein, Maria Eugenia Lemus, and myself.

This project was generously supported by the Hamilton Community Foundation and the Ontario Arts Council.

While I am by no means a professional illustrator, I do know how to draw!

Occasionally, friends convince me to draw them things for initiatives and organizations they are involved with— I like to throw my support behind causes that mean something to me. Over the past few years, I’ve been commissioned to create original art for the YWCA’s Elect More Women and Women Vote for Action campaigns, as well as Labour Day and May Day posters and t-shirts for USW Local 1005, Hamilton’s most storied steelworker’s union local. My work for the YWCA was created in collaboration with my colleague Amy Egerdeen, who handled the application of colour to the drawings you see here.

If you ask me nicely and pay me, I may consider drawing something for you. Don’t be insulted if I don’t, though. I’m pretty selective.

2016 - 2017

60 Harvests is a body 2D and 3D work that contemplates the state of our environment, the effect of global warming on food systems and human experiences of food security and our local food supply chain. Tracing my path as a consumer of food from farmers market to urban grocery store chains, I was able to translate my understanding of food and place into a series of works that reflect on my consumption patterns, while considering other factors that effect the food systems such as industrialization and deindustrialization, food security and insecurity, and the agricultural practices of the Hamilton region and beyond. The title of the body of work draws from a recent article in Scientific American that suggests that we only have about 60 years of top soil left before our soil quality degrades completely. This claim had a direct influence on the materials and processes used in my project. 

This project is comprised of four smaller series of works: a series of photographs, two sculptural works (Fossils and Soil Horizons) and a series of reverse stencil prints (Grapes of Wrath). I was also able to continue a previous series, called The End.

For Fossils, food sourced in my local community garden, local vendors at the Farmers Market (Buttrum’s Family Farm and Dilly’s), and to a lesser extent, the grocery store, we used as a mark-making material to make 200 sculptures out of clay where the impression of the texture of local produce was impressed into clay. In an unfired state, these sculptures combine the idea of dry earth and fossilization with the form and texture of gravel found in urban and suburban areas found in the Hamilton area. For the Fossils photo series, I inserted these sculptures into public space— around the former cotton factory my studio is in, in an industrial sector where steel companies are still located as a way of quietly commenting on the impact of industrialization on the environment.

For Grapes of Wrath, I sourced local produce from the Farmer’s Market and extracted juice to create ink for a set of stencil prints. Drawing from dialogue from the movie The Grapes of Wrath— a film set during the dust bowl in the American South about a family who travels to California to become itinerant farmers— I made stencils on paper that link dialogue with the film to current environmental conditions as well as current events.

This work was shown in a two-person exhibition with Aaron Murphy at you me gallery in June of 2017. This work was generously supported by the City of Hamilton City Enrichment Fund.

2017

Curatorial Project at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre, Hamilton

Through a collection of rare banners from WAHC’s permanent collection, All or None traced the history and material culture of garment worker organizing in Canadian cities such as Toronto, Montreal and Cornwall.

The structure and strength of textile has long been seen as a metaphor for community and care. All or None explores the iconography and production of these exquisite banners as vehicles of communication, celebration, affiliation, and resistance. This exhibition highlights the undeniable beauty of the banners while sharing the stories of garment workers’ unions such as the ILGWU, ACTWU, and UNITE!, and the workers– primarily immigrant women– who fueled garment manufacturing in Canada and beyond. Presented in conversation with these historic artifacts, the work of contemporary artist Kandis Friesen explores cloth’s potential to serve as both a poetic and political text, and as a vehicle of collective vocality.

This exhibition ran at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre from January 20 to April 22, 2017.

2016

Archival photography on linen and felt and live art. A part of the Mending Lounge, a project curated by Janna Hiemstra and Dittybag at Craft Ontario, 990 Queen Street West, Toronto.

For The Mending Lounge at Craft Ontario, I was invited to create a "signature mend" that considers the act of mending as a fading practice as well as issues such as de-skilling, global labour and fast fashion. Patchwork presents views of women who worked and organized as part of the 20th century textile and garment industries in Canada. Archival photographs applied to hand-stitched patches memorialize these skilled workers, and allow us to reflect on intersections of artistic and industrial labour. The production of these small works in the gallery space, and the process of teaching visitors how to make the patches, highlighted the handwork central to both industrial work and craft traditions while creating space for considering (and mending) our fractured connection to global workers and our own labour history.

2015

A curatorial project featuring the work of Steven Cottingham, Danny Custodio, Lee Henderson, Rebecca Jane Houston, Jaclyn Quaresma and Amanda Rataj at the Peter MacKendrick Community Gallery, Artscape Wychwood Barns, Toronto.

Repair Centre examined the function and principles of repair to restore, renew, maintain and heal through an exhibition presented in the former repair barn of the Toronto Transit Commission. Through the work of six artists encompassing sculpture, photography and interdisciplinary experiments, this exhibition proposed repair as variably a utopian project, a vehicle for social justice, an opportunity for reinvention and reincarnation, and an experience beyond a simple means to an end.

Two weekends of diverse repair-themed workshops animated the area surrounding the gallery, including darning, book spine repair, urban beekeeping, tree planting (co-presented by LEAF), and others. Repair Cafe Toronto held a repair “cafe” under tents outside the gallery on the night of the opening reception.

This exhibition and its accompanying programs was supported through funding by the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council. Repair Centre was accompanied by a 24-page, full color catalogue with essays by Maggie Flynn, and myself.

Repair Centre ran from July 22 - August 2, 2015.

2015

A Hamilton Winterfest exhibition featuring Lesley Loksi Chan, Fwee Twade (Becky Katz and Matt McInnes), Hopkins Duffield, Carey Jernigan and Julia Campbell-Such, and C. Wells.

To be on the waterfront is to be on the threshold of something. The waterfront is where settlers landed, and early trade took place. In the 19th Century, the area surrounding Hamilton's Pier 8 was home to some of the city's first industrial sites, including an iron works, boat works, sail loft and glass company.

In On The Waterfront, local industrial sites and history serve as points of departure for contemporary artists from around the region. Evocative outdoor installations draw on skills, materials and forms associated with early industry as well as the social history of the North End neighbourhood. This exhibition considers Hamilton's waterfront as a site of historical significance, tension and possibility, as well as a place where past stories and dreams of the future collide.

This exhibition was supported by the City of Hamilton.

2014

A Hamilton Winterfest exhibition featuring Floyd Elzinga (Beamsville), Hitoko Okada (Hamilton), Jacqui Oakley and Jamie Lawson (Hamilton), TH&B Collective (Hamilton), Thea Haines (Hamilton) and Tonya Hart (Toronto).

A hare shares visions of the Aurora Borealis with a wolf. An illuminated lotus beacons against the harbour line. A glowing wool house harkens back to the accounts of early settlers in Ontario, while a mysterious driftwood figure encased in ice recalls annual ice harvest from the Hamilton bay. Winterlore featured the work of six artists and collectives who have drawn on winter folklore, stories and symbols from close to home and around the world to create dynamic installations. Evoking tales told typically indoors, these artworks brought them to life in the winter landscape among the local community.

Part of the Hamilton Winterfest Kick Off Event, this exhibition took place on February 1st, 2014 at Pier 8, 47 Discovery Drive, Hamilton. Supported by the City of Hamilton.

2012 - 2013

Father Knowledge, Mother Tongue, presented as part of my degree requirements at OCAD University, was a collaborative research and publishing project. Taking inspiration from diverse approaches and disciplines such as oral history, critical pedagogy, community art practices and new working class studies, the project centres around two artists books I produced in collaboration with my parents that highlight their respective stories of inmigration and immigration, language, labour and adaptation. Compiling these convergent stories and elevating them through the production of both publications and works of art, Father Knowledge, Mother Tongue addresses the importance of integrating overlooked voices-- particularily those of immigrants and the working class-- into the cultural landscape.

This project resulted in two publications, Rechneek (made in collaboration with Depka Bursey) and You Can't Get That From Here (made in collaboration with Gower Bursey). At the publication launch at OCAD University on April 5th, 2013, a short Macedonian language lesson was led by Depka Bursey. 

I'd like to acknowledge Jennifer Rudder and Andrea Fatona, my advisors, for their support of this project.

A selection of work using food as both subject and material, made from 2006 to 2014, in Toronto, Baltimore and Hamilton.

One of the greatest things about doing programming for a living is when my friends and I have wacky event ideas, I have the skills to help make them happen. I’ve put on talks, concerts, benefits and movie nights over the years supporting the projects and in collaboration with friends and colleagues of mine. Being a punk rocker for 20 years and knowing how to do things on a shoestring has allowed me to do these things through a different lens than other people who work in culture who get a bit too precious sometimes.