During our artists-in-residence at the McLoughlin Gardens cottage in the Comox Valley, we (Deanne Achong and Lois Klassen) had a chance to attend the “Art Opening + Artist Talks” for the exhibition SAFE at the Comox Valley Art gallery (CVAG). The title for the exhibition and its accompanying zine includes this byline,
Holding space for lived experiences and safer ways of being amidst the Toxic Drug Poisoning Crisis.”
Just before the event got started Caresse N., the community engagement coordinator from Walk With Me, the team that produced the project, traded copies of SAFE for Sarah Shamash’s Didactics to Postpone the End of the World and Deanne Achong’s Mama D’Lo and Missy G Under the Sea.
SAFE (the zine) is a guidebook for not just the exhibition at CVAG but also the complex art and research methods that produced it, and the creativity and knowledge it gathered. It describes how the exhibition and events are pieces of a participatory action research (PAR) project that aimed to “hold space” for the perspectives of those most impacted by the toxic drug poisoning crises: people with lived and living experience (PWLLE) and safer supply service providers. To access and publicly share those perspectives, the exhibition features large and small scale photographs from PWLLE artists. Those artists were guided in the use of pinhole and Polaroid processes by Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras who are experts in public-facing and community engaged art making. The resulting images are dynamic, even though they are fixed onto large format prints arranged around the main gallery. Owing to the slow exposure times needed with use of tin can pin hole cameras, the prints capture the blurred movement of outdoor life surrounding CVAG. The ones that appear in the zine mostly feature solitary figures or their shoes in the unnoticed spaces of Courtney’s downtown: on the pavement, alongside the bridge, by a tree. Damaged signs, parking lots, and a view up to the top of the totem in front of the gallery, bring forward the visual viewpoints of those receiving harm reduction services. Their viewpoints, and those of AVI Health and Community Services providers, are also available in an audio recording that is part of the exhibition.
I note how the zine is missing a group photo that appears in some of the smaller test prints in the red-lit “dark room” in the exhibition. It is a picture that was casually mentioned at the opening during one of the explanations of the project’s methods. In it the photographers are sitting on the shallow steps in front of the gallery. Like the others it is blurry and unrecognizable. The blurriness is itself a harm reduction strategy since the simple acts of visual representation and recognition of PWLLE pose risks to personal safety, given public stigma and association of drug use with law enforcement. At the opening the photographers described how difficult it was to sit still for the long exposure, and how it attracted the attention of passersby. It was so striking to consider this group of artists whose other photos show them in mostly solitary poses, and who are often walking (or migrating, to consider the RML theme) owing to their sometimes un-housed lives, making up a silent crowd –unified and present in a prominent public location in the silent act of making a picture of themselves.
There is so much more to say about the skilled use of methods to combine research and art, from the perspective of such a beautifully realized exhibition. Those methods can be learned about through the links provided (artists’ and organizations’ links above).
Besides all of the photos and quoted excerpts that appear in the zine, there is also a thorough summary of this project’s review of current literature about safer supply and the poisoned drug crises (by Trevor Wideman and the Walk With Me team). Those findings are sobering, especially for the way they describe safer supply as very difficult to access, and fraught with social and political barriers. Less than 4% of the estimated 115,000 people living with opioid use disorder in BC in 2023 were prescribed safer supply (according to a report from the BC Provincial Health Officer, quoted on page 63 of SAFE zine).
From those who live with safer supply who were quoted in the exhibition and the zine, Morgan summarizes the project’s outcomes, this way,
There’s a million arguments for safe supply and really no arguments against it. In my opinion, it’s as simple as that, really it’s a miracle, and more people should be understanding and see it as safe supply and not enabling, because it’s also saving their possessions, saving their states, because no one’s going to rob them or hurt them to get dope. How can you have a group of people, different types of people together, if they don’t understand each other? Not feel like it’s us and them, it’s all of us, right?” (SAFE zine, page 31)
Thank you to everyone behind SAFE for picturing and inviting “different types of people together” in understanding, once on the steps of the gallery, now inside the gallery, and in all private and public spaces around us.
