The Murals of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: Murals
  Search by one or more criteria:
 
 
     
  Or browse by location:
 



Other
Views,
This
Location

Displaying 1-3 of 3

 

Displaying Locations 712-716 of 721

         

390 York Avenue (1)    Location Map
  

'Heavy Night'.


Location: SW corner York & Edmonton; North Face

Occupant: Garriock Insurance

District: City Centre

Neighbourhood: South Portage

Artist(s): Makoto Chi

Year: 2021

Sponsors: Wall to Wall Mural & Culture Festival, Synonym Art Consultation, Graffiti Art Programming, Downtown Winnipeg BIZ, Signex Manufacturing

 

Makoto Chi Artist Statement"'Heavy Night' is part of a loose, informal series of drawings sharing similar aesthetics themes. They are spaces where I reflect on sexuality, community, and different types of grief. In Japanese folklore, the fox, or Kitsune, is often a figure of trickery and transformation. I think of this often when I am thinking of drawing bodies, of the bodies I am in community with, and my own mixed-race, Japanese and Jewish selfhoods: that myself and many folks around me have genders, and are of racial categories not understood by the colonized west. Many of us, too, shapeshift between spaces to eak out survival, or a comfortable life. The term 'masking', too, is used to describe the neurodivergent experience of putting up a facade for the comfort of others, and the safety of the self. Many of my figures wear masks much like the Kisune, and are intentionally made with ambiguity in mind: I think of them as shapeshifters stuck between forms. With '"Heavy Night', I am thinking of these masks, and I am thinking of burdens, too, of the literal literal heaviness of being alive as a trans person, and of a more light but pervasive sexual frustration of being tethered to one form. The feeling I am thinking of when reflecting on this drawing, is of a sweaty evening, yearning for intimacy and being tied up in burdensome, probably oppressive contexts, unsure of what type of creature one must be to be OK. My hope is that this rings familiar to queer imaginations that encounter this image, to hold up little mirrors for folks to see themselves in, and with all of my work, to open doors for folks to think of their own relations, and narratives, of sexuality, power, and their place in whatever part of the land they are on."